Fabrizio Del Maffeo

Fabrizio Del Maffeo is co-founder and chief executive of Axelera AI, a chip company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that designs processors for running AI on cameras, robots and other devices. He co-founded it in 2021 with Evangelos Eleftheriou after years building computing hardware inside the ASUS group, where he launched the UP line of developer boards.

Developer boards and a first AI accelerator

He studied telecommunication engineering at Politecnico di Milano and spent most of his career in product development, product management and sales for computing and industrial hardware at Advantech and at Aaeon, the IoT subsidiary of ASUS. In 2015 he launched UP through a Kickstarter campaign, and the boards became popular with industrial computing customers. In 2018 he and Intel launched an M.2 accelerator card based on the Movidius Myriad 2 chip. He later told AiThority that “the technology fell short on many aspects since it wasn’t tailored on pure on device AI acceleration.” He also led AI work at Bitfury Group before Axelera.

Metis and edge AI

Axelera’s Metis chip uses digital in-memory computing, which places computation inside the memory to cut the energy spent moving data, and it launched in November 2024. “Today’s AI runs in data centers. You talk to ChatGPT over the internet. We believe the future is edge AI: intelligence running in your car, phone, and building systems,” he said in a Verve Ventures interview.

He says the company moves fast on product and slowly on hiring. “Each candidate goes through six or seven interviews,” he told Verve, and he believes staff stay for the mission: “Most people at Axelera could earn more at big American firms. They stay because they believe in the mission.” He also recalled a lead investor pulling out the night before a round was to be signed. “It was crushing,” he said.

He argues that European startups sell too early to American buyers. “We need IPOs, not just acquisitions,” he said, and in a Tech Tour interview he added, “For companies to truly succeed, we must refuse to think of ourselves as European players only.”