The REBECCA project is an SME-driven initiative that aims to democratize the development of edge AI systems. It will create a complete hardware and software stack centered around a RISC-V CPU, which will offer significantly higher performance, energy efficiency, safety, and security than existing systems. This will be achieved by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and making significant advances in processing units, hardware accelerators, reconfigurable hardware, and AI libraries and frameworks. The project will demonstrate its approach on four real-world use cases and two benchmarks from various domains. It will develop a novel chip comprising two tightly-coupled chiplets with features such as RISC-V multicore, Neuromorphic AI Accelerator, and Memory Encryption.