Axelera AI attracts CTO from IBM Zurich

Eindhoven-based Axelera AI has announced that Evangelos Eleftheriou has joined its executive team as CTO. The ambitious artificial-intelligence semiconductor startup has also appointed two new scientific advisors: professors Marian Verhelst and Luca Benini. The trio will be supporting the development of Axelera’s scalable AI hardware for applications at the edge.

Eleftheriou, an IEEE and IBM Fellow, has held various management positions at IBM Research. Among them, he has been the department head of cloud and computing infrastructure as well as the leader of the neuromorphic and in-memory computing activities at Big Blue’s Zurich lab. Bringing more than 35 years of research, leadership and industry experience, he joins Axelera’s growing team in Switzerland.

Newly appointed advisor Verhelst is the senior scientific director of Imec and a professor at KU Leuven, where she specializes in digital and analog accelerators. She founded the university’s research consortium on context-aware ubiquitous computing (Cubiqlab). Benini is the current chair of Digital Circuits and Systems at D-ITET ETH Zurich and a full professor at the University of Bologna.