Axelera AI: Looking Back on 2025

We actually anticipated a roller coaster of a year at Axelera AI in 2025, but in all honesty it’s still caught us by surprise just how much of a ride it’s been. Everything’s happened in such a whirlwind of creative techno-endeavour that it’s hard to even remember what things looked like this time last year. So it feels like the right time to reflect on what’s been accomplished, the partnerships we've built, and where we're headed next.

Opening Up: Voyager SDK Goes Public

If you can believe it, it was only back in March when we took a huge step by making the Voyager SDK publicly available on GitHub. For a company built on making AI accessible to everyone, this felt like the natural thing to do. And the response from the developer community has both proven that to be the right move, and returned a huge groundswell of support from the AI community.

Since then, we've shipped four major releases:

• v1.2.5 (March): The public debut, packed with tools, models, and sample pipelines

• v1.3 (June): Added experimental LLM support, Windows compatibility, YOLO11 models, and proper thermal management

• v1.4 (August): Brought YOLOv10, person re-identification, and face recognition

• v1.5 (November): Ubuntu 24.04 support (I love this one!), Python 3.12, and our 4-chip PCIe cards

Each release has increasingly been shaped by feedback from our community. Whether it's debugging customer issues or adding new models to the zoo, the collaboration has been genuinely invaluable. You have driven Voyager forward just as much as we have.

Building the Developer Experience

Alongside the SDK going public, we rolled out the infrastructure to properly support developers, partners, businesses, makers and everyone who’s as excited about AI as we are.

We redesigned axelera.ai from the ground up, launched a support portal packed with guides and support docs, published a growing GitHub repo full of examples and tutorials, and opened our webstore so anyone can get their hands on Metis hardware without going through a lengthy sales process.

And as you’re aware (since you’re here right now), we built this community that's now home to over 500 AI enthusiasts, members, devs and makers. Watching developers help each other troubleshoot issues, share projects, and push the boundaries of what's possible with Metis has been one of the genuine highlights of the year. There's something satisfying about seeing a Raspberry Pi user in one thread helping solve a problem for someone running a multi-stream industrial deployment in another.

These touchpoints have become the foundation of how we’ll engage with AI developers from this year on. The goal was simple: make it easy to get started, easy to find answers, and easy to connect with others doing similar work. Based on the activity we're seeing, it seems to be working.

Expanding Platform Support

One of the quieter, but still vitally important stories of 2025 has been the steady expansion of platforms we officially support.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now fully supported, which was a popular request from makers and prototypers. It was actually a casual side project one of our engineers was tinkering with, but it perfomed so well it kickstarted an enthusiasm across the whole of Axelera to look much more closely at these kinds of SBC form factors. It was the springboard that saw bring-up guides for the Orange Pi 5 Plus and NanoPC-T6 quickly arriving, for those building compact, cost-effective edge deployments.

For more demanding applications, we added support for Jetson Orin Nano and Jetson Orin NX, alongside systems running Intel Xeon D and W processors and AMD Ryzen 7 hosts. The Arduino Portenta X8 integration means industrial developers have a proper pathway too.

The underlying philosophy here is flexibility. Whether you're a student experimenting on a Raspberry Pi, a startup prototyping on Orange Pi, or an enterprise deploying on industrial-grade x86 systems, we want Metis to just work. Each release has pushed that vision a bit further, and we can honestly say that we arrive at these milestones in exactly the same way you do - we experiement, test, iterate, fails a bunch of times, but find that the ecosystem is ultimately capable of doing whatever we can imagine.

New Hardware: From Metis to Europa

Our hardware lineup grew significantly this year, with each addition shaped by what developers actually need.

The 4 Quad-Core Metis PCIe card was developed to deliver a real flagship Metis device. One that packs in the inference power without taking up more space in your system. More streams, more models, more throughput. More AIPUs on one board. It's for video analytics watching dozens of cameras, or industrial systems running cascaded pipelines. If you've outgrown a single chip but don't want to rearchitect your software, this is the upgrade path we wanted to deliver.

The Metis Compute Board solves a different problem. Too many customers were spending more time on host system integration than building AI applications. So we gave them a complete system: plug in power, connect a display, run inference. It's found its home in rapid prototyping, compact IoT deployments, and anywhere that "it just works" matters most. The CES Innovation Awards recognition was a nice bonus.

Metis M.2 Max, announced in September, came from growing demand for LLMs at the edge. The original M.2 is brilliant for computer vision, but generative AI simply needs more memory bandwidth. M.2 Max will deliver that while keeping the same tiny footprint and low power draw, plus it's ruggedised for harsher environments.

Then there's Europa, unveiled in October. This is where we're heading next: second-generation AI cores for workloads that blur the line between edge and datacenter. Multiple 4K streams, multi-user generative AI, compute density that previously meant expensive GPU infrastructure. All solved here, as the whole industry moves inevitably towards the edge.

We also announced Titania, our AI inference chiplet for high-performance computing, developed as part of the EuroHPC DARE project and aimed at supercomputing applications.

Europa and Titania won't ship until 2026 and beyond, but 2025 was the year they came to life. Even as we shipped Metis products to customers, our hardware teams already had an eye on what needs to come next.

Funding and Support

In March, we secured €60 million in funding from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and member states. This wasn't just money though; it was validation that Europe is serious about building sovereign AI infrastructure. Combined with our previous Series B funding, we've now raised over $200 million. That’s a lot of faith that the sector and the region have placed in Axelera AI.

We were also selected for the EIC Step Up programme, which provides significant additional equity investment to help scale operations. As Bloomberg reported in August, we're deep in discussions for an additional round to expand our edge AI and datacenter activities even further next year.

Building an Ecosystem

One of the highlights of 2025 was formalising partnerships that genuinely matter. Not just to us, but to the European AI sector in general.

Our collaboration with Arduino, announced late last year, came to life at CES in January. Pairing our Metis accelerators with Arduino's Portenta modules means millions of developers can now access proper AI acceleration in a familiar environment. It's exactly the kind of democratisation we set out to achieve from day one.

In June, we launched the Partner Accelerator Network with founding members including Aetina, Arduino, Astute, C&T Solution, Eurocomposant, Macnica, and Seco. This isn't just a logo wall to fancy up our website, by the way. It's a actual, active ecosystem of partners helping customers move from proof-of-concept to production. It’s the bedrock of what Axelera’s building.

The partnership with the European Space Agency deserves a special mention, too. ESA chose Axelera because of our sovereign technology and long-term availability. When your hardware might spend a decade in space, those things matter. It's humbling to think our chips could help answer some of the universe's biggest questions (and it’s just cool as hell to have your gear in orbit!).

We've also deepened ties with Lenovo, Dell, Advantech, and Micron, and validated our platform on BalenaOS for fleet deployments. And most recently, we teamed up with YOLO model creator Ultralytics, in what’s set to be an epic leap forward now our cutting-edge acceleration is seamlessly integrated into the Ultralytics models. You can see more about that in the video below.

Showing Up

We've been crazy busy at industry events this year too. Highlights include:

• CES 2025 in Las Vegas, where we were named a CES Innovation Awards Honoree for the Metis Compute Board

• Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg, showcasing solutions with duagon and Arduino

• ISC West 2025, where we demonstrated real-time YOLOv8l inference on 8K video

• COMPUTEX 2025 in Taiwan, displaying our growing partner ecosystem

• Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, discussing sovereign AI

We've also participated in important European policy discussions, including the AI Continent Action Plan launch in Brussels, the French AI Action Summit, and the State of Dutch Tech.

What It All Means

Looking at 2025 in totality, a few themes emerge.

First, edge AI is real and 2025 is the year it arrived for everyone. The gap between what's theoretically possible and what actually works in production environments is rapidly closing. Our customers are deploying real solutions for retail, manufacturing, security, transportation and more.

Second, European tech sovereignty matters. The funding, the partnerships, the policy engagement. There's a genuine momentum behind building AI infrastructure that isn't dependent on a single geography or vendor.

Third, and most importantly, none of this happens without the community. The developers filing issues on GitHub, the partners building solutions, the customers pushing us to do better. Thank you all for joining us.

What's Next

Europa ships in 2026. The M.2 Max won’t be far behind. Titania is well on track, too. We'll keep improving Voyager SDK based on what you tell us you need. And we'll keep working to make AI accessible, efficient, and genuinely useful.

As our CEO Fabrizio likes to say: it's still day one. The best is yet to come.