The company is opening a 20,000-square-foot headquarters in Silicon Valley to deploy AI agents to accelerate chip design workflows. Sandeep Bharathi is joining the advisory board.
ChipAgents, a leader in agentic AI platforms for the semiconductor design industry, announced it has closed a $50 million oversubscribed Series A1 funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $74 million. The round was led by Matter Venture Partners, a hardware technology venture capital firm backed by TSMC, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson.
As part of this investment, Wen Hsieh, founding partner and managing director of Matter VP, will join ChipAgents’ board of directors, bringing with him more than two decades of expertise and relationships in the field of semiconductor design and manufacturing.
Building a skilled AI workforce for electronic chip design companies
This new capital will enable ChipAgents to aggressively develop its Agentic AI platform, expand its engineering and research organization, and accelerate the global deployment of multi-agent chip teams. ChipAgents is building the foundational AI infrastructure for chip design, with coordinated AI agents capable of planning, reasoning, executing, and continuously improving complex silicon-related programs. By transforming chip development into a native, results-driven AI system, ChipAgents is redefining innovation in the semiconductor industry.
“We are building an agentic AI workforce for the semiconductor industry,” said William Wang, CEO and founder of ChipAgents. “Our multi-agent AI teams aren’t just copilots or AI assistants; they truly take ownership. They read specifications, break down objectives, discuss and implement solutions, validate results, and iterate relentlessly. This isn’t incremental productivity software. It’s a revolutionary AI execution platform for silicon design.”
“As chip complexity explodes and the lack of experienced chip design talent becomes a limiting factor, the future belongs to hybrid teams of humans and AI with best-in-class AI agent infrastructure,” Wang added. “ChipAgents enables small IC design teams to operate like much larger organizations, scaling at startup speed. This funding accelerates our mission to make AI-driven chip innovation the default model for the design, manufacture, and commercialization of all silicon.”
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Strategic partnership with industry leaders
The investment from Matter Venture Partners, a venture capital firm deeply rooted in the international semiconductor ecosystem, reinforces confidence in ChipAgents’ vision to create the Agentic AI platform, driving the next generation of silicon innovation. With major foundries manufacturing the vast majority of the world’s most advanced chips, this alignment with investors embedded in the ecosystem positions ChipAgents at the heart of a structural shift toward the development of AI-native chips.
“The semiconductor industry is entering a phase where the limits to chip design productivity no longer lie in the tools themselves,” said Wen Hsieh, founding partner and managing director of Matter Venture Partners. “The constraints now relate to talent availability, human capacity, and the speed of design iteration. ChipAgents directly addresses this issue with an agentic AI platform capable of dramatically increasing engineering and design capabilities alongside advancements in advanced manufacturing. As the AI ecosystem demands increasingly complex and high-performance semiconductors, we believe ChipAgents will become essential for any chip company looking to shape the future of AI and computing.”
Market dynamics and customer adoption
Building on the momentum of its Series A funding round completed a few months ago, ChipAgents has achieved a 140x year-over-year annual recurring growth (ARR) and expanded its deployments to 80 major semiconductor companies, securing several multi-year, multi-million dollar licensing agreements. The team has grown from 10 to 46 employees and relocated its headquarters from Santa Barbara to a new, state-of-the-art facility in Santa Clara, positioning the company at the heart of the global semiconductor ecosystem. In Tier 1 semiconductor programs within real-world production environments, ChipAgents is delivering disruptive performance gains.
- Reading and understanding technical specifications 15 times faster
- Reduction of formal assertion generation time by a factor of 240;
- Full code and functionality coverage through formal verification;
- Generation of the UVM environment 400 times faster.
These results translate into significantly shorter verification cycles, complete visibility into the design, and a new speed of execution in complex digital integrated circuit design programs, enabling teams to deliver more silicon with greater speed, confidence, and control.
An internationally renowned advisory committee is expanding
Sandeep Bharathi, president of Marvell’s Data Center Group, has joined ChipAgents’ advisory board, bringing with him over two decades of experience developing chips for very large-scale cloud and enterprise infrastructures. His expertise in scaling complex SoC programs, from design to mass production, will help ChipAgents continue its rapid growth.
“Semiconductor development continues to grow in complexity as systems expand into the cloud and enterprise infrastructures. The industry needs to rethink how engineering teams are supported. ChipAgents is exploring how AI can create design and verification workflows, and I look forward to advising the company in pursuing this mission,” said Sandeep Bharathi.
Mr. Bharathi joins an advisory committee that already includes Wally Rhines, former CEO of Mentor Graphics (now Siemens EDA); Raúl Camposano, former technical director of Synopsys; Jack Harding, former CEO of Cadence; John Bowers, pioneer in electrical engineering; and Erez Tsur, former CEO of Cadence Israel.
Source: Businesswire
