Evangelos Eleftheriou, Axelera AI: From IBM to the Startup Reshaping the AI Chips Landscape
About the speaker
In the seventh episode of the 6th season of Outliers, we meet Evangelos Eleftheriou – Co-Founder & CTO of Axelera AI.
Raised in Greece, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Patras and continued with master’s and doctoral studies at Carleton University in Canada. From an early stage, he believed that scientific knowledge could be transformed into real technology, and for over thirty years, he proved it at IBM Research Zurich. There, he became one of the world’s leading researchers, receiving the company’s highest technical distinction as an IBM Fellow, and he is also an IEEE Fellow.
In 2021, in Eindhoven, he co-founded Axelera AI with the goal of bringing powerful, efficient Edge AI “on-device” – right where data is generated. Axelera AI designs “smart” AI chips that enable immediate decisions, better privacy protection, and lower energy consumption in applications such as factories, retail stores, security cameras, and robots.
The company’s trajectory is impressive: from the initial €12M seed round in 2021, Axelera AI has grown into a rapidly expanding European deep-tech company with over 200 employees and has secured more than $200M in funding.
Evangelos envisions a Europe that leads in technology, a direction that Axelera AI serves, developing one of the most efficient and advanced AI solutions in Europe, bringing technology closer to real-world applications.
