Agentic artificial intelligence startup ChipAgents said today it’s ready to bring automation to one of the toughest challenges of all after raising $50 million in an early-stage funding today, bringing its total amount raised to date to $74 million.

The Series A1 round was led by Matter Venture Partners and saw participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Ericsson AG and the chipmakers Micron Technologies Inc. and MediaTek Inc.

As the name suggests, ChipAgents believes AI agents can help to transform the way silicon chips are designed and developed. It has built a highly automated chip design platform that uses coordinated AI agents capable of planning, reasoning and executing tasks across extremely complex chip design pipelines. The idea is to shift these workflows toward an AI-native model in order to reduce the manual engineering work that normally goes into them, speeding up design and verification cycles.

Electronic design automation software from companies like Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems Inc. have integrated AI smarts in their platforms for years already, but Wang said these tools act more like assistants. There’s little by way of automation going on in those platforms. ChipAgents, on the other hand, uses AI agents that actually perform work on behalf of humans and iterate on their ideas, aiming to compress design cycles.

ChipAgents founder and Chief Executive William Wang said the platform is much more than just a simple AI assistant. Its agents are meant to take “full ownership” of chip design tasks. He said the platform facilitates a shift toward AI teams that can handle design and verification at scale.

That’s important, he believes, because engineering talent is becoming a bottleneck. Simply put, the growing complexity of today’s processors means humans can barely keep up. “[Our agents] read specifications, break down objectives, discuss and implement solutions, validate results and iterate relentlessly,” he said.

Wang said the AI agents are meant to support small, integrated circuit design teams and help them operate at the speed of much larger groups, allowing them to complete verification checks more rapidly and deliver higher-performing chips much faster than they otherwise could. The platform accelerates core workflows, eliminates tedious tasks, reduces the need for manual code checks and provides clearer visibility into design processes.

Time for a new approach

ChipAgents is bursting onto the chip design scene at a time when the industry is under pressure from two sides. On the one hand, chip designs are becoming increasingly complex in order to support the enormous compute demands of AI and the power-efficiency needs of enterprises. Meanwhile, there simply isn’t a deep enough pool of experienced chip engineers around to meet the needs of every company.

Wang said that the verification stage alone can eat up more than 70% of a project’s total development time. That’s why schedule overruns and engineering bottlenecks have become more or less standard in chip design projects, he said.

Matter Venture Partners’ Wen Hsieh said productivity in the semiconductor industry is no longer limited by the available tools, but rather human’s ability to design and iterate. “ChipAgents addresses this constraint directly with an Agentic AI platform capable of significantly scaling engineering and design capacity alongside advanced manufacturing progress,” he said. “As the AI ecosystem demands increasingly complex, higher-performing silicon, we believe ChipAgents will be essential for any chip company that wants to shape the future of AI and compute.”

ChipAgents certainly makes some impressive claims. It said its platform is already being used in live production deployments by a number of chipmakers, helping them to speed up specification reading and comprehension by 15 times and reduce formal assertion generation times by more than 99%.

The startup will use the funding from today’s round to build up its engineering and research teams and accelerate the global rollout of its agentic platform. In the longer term, it will help the company to realize its vision of a model where AI agents can handle the full arc of chip development, from reading specifications and generating verification environments to running the formal checks and debugging.

Image: ChipAgents