Exclusive: Nvidia Rival Taps Intel Veteran To Grow Americas Business

Alexis Crowell, the newly appointed general manager of Americas for Netherlands-based Axelera AI, tells CRN that that the U.S. will be a top priority for her as part of the Partner Accelerator Network program she helped launch in early June.

A startup challenging Nvidia in the edge AI chip market has appointed a 19-year Intel veteran to grow the company’s business in the Americas, weeks after it launched a global partner program to work closely with systems integrators and value-added resellers.

Netherlands-based Axelera AI announced on Tuesday that it has promoted CMO Alexis Crowell (pictured in center), who joined the company last October, to general manager of Americas, a role that makes her responsible for building a strategy and supporting commercial operations across the region, which includes North America and South America.

The startup also announced the hiring of Oxa executive Marta Ostroumoff (pictured on right) as CFO and Eke Bijzitter (pictured on left), who previously worked for 13 years at the company now known as Thales Digital Identity and Security, as head of legal.

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Crowell said the U.S. will be a top priority for her as part of the Partner Accelerator Network she helped launch with over 15 partners more than three weeks ago, but the startup is also looking at other countries such as Canada, Mexico and Brazil where Axelera AI’s edge AI chips could appeal to customers.

“Obviously, Mexico has a lot of manufacturing there as companies continue to look at what their supply chain strategies really look like. That means there's automation opportunities and putting AI in those factories,” said Crowell, who is keeping her global CMO role.

Within the edge computing market, Axelera AI is going after several use cases for its Metis edge AI accelerator chips, which the company said provide high performance and power efficiency “at the fraction of the cost of alternative solutions.”

The startup’s chips can power systems for use cases such as computer vision, smart cities, health care, robotics, security, retail and industrial manufacturing.

Crowell said while the number of Axelera AI employees in the U.S. is in the single digits right now, the team is “growing pretty rapidly” with plans to hire field application engineers, for example, who will work closely with the startup’s partners.

Prior to joining Axelera AI as CMO last fall, Crowell spent most of her career at Intel, where she was most recently vice president and CTO of the Asia-Pacific Japan region and general manager of technology solutions, software and services.

That role is helping inform her expanded responsibilities at Axelera AI.

“All of the technical sellers reported into me [at Intel]. So it’s a really good kind of mix of things I've done in the past too, just in a different region,” Crowell said.

The CEO of Miami-based mini PC maker Azulle previously told CRN that he sees big channel potential for Axelera if the startup is able to market the Metis platform properly.

“They just need to get the message out there everywhere,” said Azulle CEO Alex Rodriguez. “We’ve done some pilot programs with some customers, and it’s working really well.”