AI Chip Maker Axera Secures $126 Million in A++ Financing Round

Axera, a Chinese startup developing artificial intelligence (AI) chips for computer vision applications, announced on Monday the completion of an A++ round of financing, with a total amount of 800 million yuan ($126 million). 

Qiming Venture Partners, Inno-Chip, Meituan and Meituan-backed Long-Z, Heju Investment, GGV Capital, Lenovo-backed Legend Star and Glory Ventures all participated in this round of financing. This is the fourth round completed by Axera so far, which comes less than half a year after its A+ round.

The funds raised in this round will be mainly invested in industrial resources. Axera also plans to attract top talent from across the industry, expand its business, build industrial cooperation and develop high-end chips that can compete at an international level.

Established in May 2019, Axera mainly focuses on building AI vision processor chips. Its core products support a variety of AI visual tasks, and are widely used for applications in smart cities, smart communities, smart driving, smart retail and smart homes.

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Axera has built up a team supporting design through production of chips. The core members have participated in the development of more than 10 types of chips. Up to now, Axera has successfully launched two generations of mass-produced edge AI vision chips: the AX630A and the AX620A.

In terms of core technology, the firm has advanced hybrid-precision neural processing unit (NPU), which provides an efficient AI basic computing platform with high computing power, low costs and low power consumption.

Axera also has self-developed AI image signal processing (ISP) technology. Based on the joint architecture design of its own ISP and NPU, it can greatly improve the performance of several key modules in traditional ISP and provide infrastructure for customers to expand graphics and image services.