Axelera AI Appoints Osman Kent and Catherine Lewis La Torre CBE as Non-Executive Directors
Veteran GPU pioneer and former British Business Bank CEO join the board as Axelera scales further into enterprise and
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Axelera AI, the leading provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology, today announced the appointments of Osman Kent and Catherine Lewis La Torre CBE to its board as non-executive directors. Together they bring decades of experience building silicon companies and scaling businesses through Europe’s private capital markets.
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Veteran GPU pioneer, Osman Kent and former British Business Bank CEO, Catherine Lewis La Torre join Axelera AI board
“Osman is one of the luminaries of deep tech in Europe and helped invent the GPU, and Catherine has spent 35 years backing and building Europe’s innovation economy,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI. “Their experience will be invaluable as we grow our global commercial scale.”
Kent co-founded and led 3Dlabs, a one time $1 billion NASDAQ-listed chip company widely credited as one of the earliest architects of the GPU, and later co-founded Numecent. He holds 21 U.S. patents and has been a venture partner at Atlantic Bridge Capital since 2018, focusing on foundational AI and fabless chip companies.
“I’ve been following Axelera since its inception and it is doing for AI inference what 3Dlabs did for graphics: showing the world that Europe can build world leading AI technology companies at commercial scale,” said Kent.
Lewis La Torre has more than 35 years of experience in private equity and venture capital, including co-founding her own private equity fund management firm in 1999. Between 2016 and 2023 she served as Chief Executive of the British Business Bank and its commercial investment companies, leading the Bank to become the largest domestic institutional investor in venture capital funds and technology companies in the UK and overseeing the delivery of the UK’s Covid-19 business support schemes. She sits on the boards of HSBC Innovation Banking UK and Alantra Partners and is an adviser to Octopus Energy Generation.
“Axelera is exactly the kind of European deep tech company that can compete globally in AI,” said Lewis La Torre. “For years I have focused on helping companies that can make a real difference in deep tech, life sciences, and climate; Axelera technology works across all of these segments and I’m excited to help the team turn technical leadership into lasting commercial success.”
About Axelera AI
Axelera AI is a European AI semiconductor company developing next-generation AI acceleration hardware for edge computing and data center applications. With an edge-first architecture that addresses AI’s critical energy and cooling constraints, Axelera AI has deployed across more than 600 customers including in telecommunications, aerospace, and enterprise sectors. The company’s Europa and Metis platforms deliver high-performance AI inference solutions that enable deployment at scale within real-world power and thermal budgets. Through its Partner Accelerator Network and Voyager SDK, Axelera AI provides a comprehensive ecosystem approach that ensures accessibility and rapid deployment.
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