Fabrizio Del Maffeo builds by instinct—and on deadline. When he saw the opportunity to bring AI to edge devices, he acted fast. Within six months, his team at Axelera AI had a working design. In three years, they were shipping production-ready chips, backed by over $200 million in funding and tested by more than 100 customers across the globe.
His path into deep tech leadership came through product launches. At ASUS and Advantech, he worked across sales, development, and operations. He created a hardware line on Kickstarter that became a widely adopted Intel reference design. At Bitfury, he led the AI division and was a member of the C-suite executive team.
At Axelera, engineers are trusted to lead, decisions are made close to the work, and prototypes are moved quickly into testing. He sees leadership as a way to enable progress by structuring the team well, setting the right pace, and staying open to challenges. “Anyone can confront the CEO and challenge the CEO,” he’s said, and he means it.
Del Maffeo’s focus is on making edge AI usable and accessible: shipping high-performance chips, building the supporting software, and keeping the cost and energy requirements low enough to enable widespread adoption. His team’s output reflects that bias toward execution: powerful inference hardware, a developer-ready SDK, and a roadmap that keeps expanding.
Del Maffeo is candid about the challenges. “Running a startup means to eat failures for breakfast,” he said. The key is to learn fast, build faster, and surround yourself with people who see what you can’t. Many of Axelera’s early hires came from IBM, ETH Zurich, and Qualcomm—engineers and researchers who had the technical depth to match his urgency.
Even as Axelera scales—now in 10 countries with over 200 employees—Del Maffeo remains grounded in the ecosystem that helped launch the company. “We are just at the beginning of something big,” he’s said. Coming from someone who’s already delivered at this pace, this reads less like a prediction and more like a plan.
