Fabrizio Del Maffeo will tell you that he completely underestimated what he was getting into. “Starting a business is going to be tough; tougher than expected,” he’s said. “If you know what is going to happen, you probably won’t start a company.”
In four years, Del Maffeo has taken Axelera AI from a seed-funded idea to one of Europe’s most closely watched AI hardware companies. It has raised more than $450 million in equity, grants, and venture debt, including a $250 million round in early 2026, the largest single raise ever for an EU AI semiconductor company.
Del Maffeo spent years building embedded computing and IoT businesses across Europe. At Bitfury Group, he built and led its AI division, where he worked with researchers who would later become Axelera’s founding team. Axelera launched in July 2021 through a merger of Bitfury AI with researchers from IBM’s Zurich lab, ETH Zurich, imec, Qualcomm, and Google. Del Maffeo and the team were building around a specific view of where AI was headed: much of it would need to run outside the cloud.
“Today, AI runs in data centers,” Del Maffeo says. “We believe the future is edge AI: intelligence running in your car, phone, and building systems. Intelligence will be embedded everywhere in the physical world, which enhances safety and privacy.”
Axelera’s Metis AI platform is built for those environments. Using digital in-memory computing technology and a RISC-V dataflow architecture, it is designed to deliver high performance with lower power use and lower cost. The company says it can improve efficiency three- to five-fold over comparable solutions.
For all the momentum, the path has not been smooth. Del Maffeo recalls a funding crisis that nearly ended the company before it began, when a lead investor pulled out just as a term sheet was about to be signed, leaving only weeks of cash. “That kind of crisis—where firefighting becomes your daily job—is something founders face again and again,” he says. “But I have learned to stay solid, be strong, and not take it personally. Never give up.”
That experience sharpened his central piece of advice of never having a plan B. “A lot of people make the mistake of thinking, ‘If things go wrong, I’ll do X.’ I think that’s wrong, because it means you’re already dividing your focus and energy. Many of us actually perform better under pressure—when we have everything to lose, we give our all.”
If there is one word that defines Axelera’s culture, it’s speed. From founding to first product delivery took 18 months. By the end of 2025, the company had grown to more than 250 employees across the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK.
Even after the company’s latest raise, Del Maffeo is careful to declare victory. “We’re in the process of making it, yeah,” he says. “But we definitely haven’t made it yet.” The answer suggests a founder who still sees far more ahead than behind.