Axelera AI, a Dutch AI semiconductor start-up, has emerged from stealth with £8.7 million in seed round funding. The funding was led by Axelera's incubator company, Bitfury, a security and infrastructure provider for the Bitcoin blockchain. Nanoelectronics R&D centre imec and venture capital Innovation Industries also participated in the seed round. Axelera is developing a chipset to accelerate AI and machine learning algorithms at the edge. The startup claims that its product will use minimal power consumption at a greatly reduced price compared to its competitors.

The novel coronavirus is the most significant public health and economic risk that the world has faced in nearly a century. It has infected more than 65 million people and killed more than 1.5 million. The economic damage from the disruption is expected to be the worst decline in global GDP since the Great Depression. Facing a new public health and economic crisis South Korea utilized lessons from its recent experience dealing with the MERS outbreak of 2015, but also integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into its response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In early January the coronavirus was largely contained to China.

GreenWaves Technologies (GreenWaves), a fabless semiconductor start-up designing disruptive ultra-low-power AI embedded processors for battery-operated edge devices, announced today that it has been named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" based on the April 29, 2019 report "Cool Vendors in AI Semiconductors," authored by Alan Priestley, VP Analyst, and Saniye Alaybeyi, Senior Director Analyst. The report states, "[t]he deployment of products with AI capabilities continues to gain momentum but requires increasingly sophisticated semiconductor devices to enable this new generation of smart things. This report highlights three semiconductor vendors delivering innovative AI-enabled chips to facilitate this trend." GreenWaves Technologies, and its flagship GAP8 IoT application processor, is listed as one of these three vendors. "We believe that Gartner's Cool Vendor reports represent some of the most cutting-edge, innovative and pioneering brands and technologies. We also believe that to be included as a Cool Vendor in AI Semiconductors is a true testament to GAP8 and the company's commitment to delivering AI at the very edge," said Loic Lietar, GreenWaves' co-founder and CEO.