Chipmaker Axelera releases Voyager Wingman to speed edge AI development

Edge artificial intelligence chip company Axelera AI B.V. today publicly released Voyager Wingman, an AI assistant that lets developers build and troubleshoot applications for its edge chips by typing plain-language requests instead of digging through documentation.

The tool connects to the company’s Voyager software development kit and its full documentation set. Developers can describe the computer vision pipeline they want and Wingman helps assemble a working version, suggests compiler settings to speed it up and diagnoses errors that stop models from compiling. Axelera first showed the assistant at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and has since tested it with customers and internal teams.

Building software for AI hardware usually means juggling model compilation, pipeline configuration, performance tuning and output visualization, steps that slow developers new to a platform. Wingman is pitched as a shortcut, giving users direct access to Axelera’s SDK, documentation and software repository through a chat window.

It also answers questions about supported operators, application programming interfaces and configuration syntax, returning worked examples rather than pointing to reference pages. Because it runs as a hosted service, its knowledge updates as Axelera ships new Toolkit releases, with no manual downloads required.

Voyager Wingman is available now as a web-based chat and as a standalone application, with a plugin for AI coding frameworks due later. The chat runs on a freemium model that gives developers a credit allowance to try it at no cost, while the app is free for those who supply their own API key. Both are reachable through the Axelera Developer Community and Customer Portal.

“Voyager Wingman reflects how we want developers to experience our platform with fewer roadblocks, faster answers, and more time spent building,” said Bram Verhoef, vice president of customer engineering and success at Axelera. The goal, he added, is to put serious edge AI development within reach of any developer, not only specialists.

Axelera is a Dutch chip company that spun out of the Belgian research institute IMEC in 2021. Its Metis and Europa processors run AI inference at the edge without the power and cooling loads of bigger chips. The company says more than 500 customers in telecommunications, aerospace and enterprise now use its hardware.

The firm has raised more than $450 million to date across equity, grants and venture debt. That includes a round of more than $250 million in February, one of the largest AI semiconductor investments in Europe, led by Innovation Industries with backing from BlackRock Inc. and the Samsung Catalyst Fund. Voyager Wingman marks Axelera’s move beyond silicon into the developer tools that sit on top of it.

Image: Axelera

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