A Herzliya Pituah-based chip startup founded just last June is pulling in serious investor attention before its pre-seed round has even closed. Axonica Labs, founded by Assaf Touboul — one of the most senior Israelis to have worked at chip giant Qualcomm — has already secured $50 million and is opening the round to additional investors, with the total potentially reaching $80 million, according to Globes reporting. The round is being led by U.S. funds Amplify Partners, Wing VC, and Qualcomm Ventures, alongside Israeli funds Pitango, Viola, and 10D. The company had no comment on the report.

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The company’s pitch is that its chip will be significantly cheaper and more energy-efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs, and that it aims to compete directly with Cerebras, the U.S.-based chip firm. Companies like Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova are already focused on this stage, which is considered more cost-effective and efficient, according to Globes.

A Founder With Deep Roots at Qualcomm

In that role, he led development of ultra-low-power analog AI chips, language model compression technologies, and model training algorithms, and registered dozens of patents. Axonica currently employs about 20 people, ten of whom hold PhDs — a concentration of technical depth that Globes described as impressive for a chip company at such an early stage.

Touboul has structured Axonica as an international operation: a U.S. company with an R&D center in Herzliya Pituah, and a separately registered UK entity. The high investor demand was significant enough that Touboul opened the round beyond its original scope to accommodate additional participants.

Israel’s Chip Sector After a Run of Setbacks

Pliops was sold to Astera and Hailo to Microchip, both at losses of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Globes. Most of the remaining promising Israeli chip companies — including Element Labs and Excite Labs — remain concentrated in the hands of investors Avigdor Willenz and his partner Gavin Baker, formerly of Fidelity.

Investors, Globes notes, are increasingly recognizing that while the business model for AI applications has yet to stabilize and software companies in the sector are viewed as risky, the chip industry continues to profit and grow driven by surging demand — even as customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic incur heavy losses and cloud giants like Google and Amazon take on billions of dollars in debt to finance chip purchases and server farm construction.