Axelera AI, a member of our Next-Gen Computing market group, has crossed a milestone that matters for the whole European deep tech ecosystem. Dealroom now places the company’s valuation in the $1.0-1.5 billion range, making Axelera AI the first unicorn in the EIC Scaling Club.
On 24 February 2026, Eindhoven-headquartered Axelera AI announced a funding round of more than $250 million (€211 million), led by Innovation Industries, with participation from new investors including BlackRock and SiteGround Capital, and continued support from existing backers including the European Innovation Council Fund, Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund, SFPIM (Belgium) and others.
This round is the largest investment ever in an EU AI semiconductor company and it aligns with Axelera AI shipping to its 500th global customer. The company’s services span physical AI and edge AI use cases across sectors such as industrial manufacturing, retail, agritech, robotics, security, defence and public safety.
Axelera AI’s edge-first approach focuses on a growing bottleneck in AI: energy consumption and cooling. As workloads move closer to where data is generated, efficient inference becomes a make-or-break factor for viable deployment.
“Data centers are hitting power and cooling limits, and as analytics move closer to where data is being created, edge AI solutions must operate within strict energy and bandwidth constraints,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI. “We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles. Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”
Why this milestone matters for Europe
Europe’s ambition in AI will not be secured by software alone. It needs competitive infrastructure – including hardware that can deliver performance within real-world power and thermal budgets, and that can support privacy- and sovereignty-driven deployments.
Axelera AI’s strategy combines co-designed hardware and software, manufacturing scale through industry partnerships, and an ecosystem approach that aims to reduce friction from pilot to production.
According to Axelera AI, the new capital will be used to:
- accelerate manufacturing scale;
- expand customer success capabilities;
- grow its partner network; and
- continue advancing the software tools and developer experience that support deployment at scale.
A first unicorn milestone for the EIC Scaling Club
The EIC Scaling Club was created to help Europe’s most promising deep tech scale-ups become world-class companies, with the ambition to see a meaningful share of members reach unicorn status.
Axelera AI’s unicorn moment is a proof-point of that mission in action – and a reminder that European deep tech can scale globally when technology leadership meets commercial execution.
For the EIC Scaling Club community, this is a win worth marking – as evidence of what is possible when Europe backs its builders for the long game.
About the EIC Scaling Club
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120 European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120 European deep tech companies have been carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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