Germany · TSMC · Intel · Datacenter Dynamics
The Edge of tomorrow
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Axelera AI CEO and co-founder Fabrizio del Maffeo never planned on being an entrepreneur.
Key facts
- Del Maffeo says that if you look inside neural networks, 70-90 percent of the operations are simple vector matrix multiplications
- Since its founding, the company has raised $450 million in capital from investors including BlackRock, Bitfury, the European Investment Council Fund, and the Samsung Catalyst Fund
- The company’s first product, Metis, was unveiled in 2024 and has been in full production since February 2025
- Most recently, in April 2026, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking announced that Italy’s new IT4LIA AI factory in Bologna would, in part, be powered by inference accelerators
Summary
But, after launching a successful Kickstarter campaign centered around IoT and Edge AI computing devices in 2015, he found himself playing (and rather enjoying) the role. “I convinced Intel to give me a chip,” Del Maffeo recalls to DCD. Dubbed UP Bridge the Gap, the project’s initial offerings were x86-based IoT development platforms, but in 2018, it pivoted to launch the UP AI Edge solution, self-described as “the first artificial intelligence on the Edge computing platform.” Although UP achieved commercial success amongst developers, del Maffeo says the technology fell short of what was needed to fully support AI workloads at the Edge, “We had thousands of customers buying the product, but the product was terrible, it was awful, because it was not meant for that kind of workload.”