ChipAgents Raises $74M for AI-Driven IC Design
ChipAgents, a U.S.-based startup, has raised $74 million to build agentic AI models that automate the full stack of integrated circuit development. The oversubscribed round was led by TSMC-backed Matter Ventures, validating strong investor interest in using AI for hardware co-design in electronics and robotics manufacturing.
- This $50 million Series A1 funding brings ChipAgents' total capital raised to $74 million, following a $21 million Series A in October 2025 led by Bessemer Venture Partners. All major existing investors, including Bessemer, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson, participated in the latest round. - As part of the investment, Wen Hsieh, a founding managing partner of lead investor Matter Venture Partners, will join the company's board of directors. ChipAgents' advisory board already includes former CEOs of top EDA companies: Wally Rhines (Mentor Graphics), Raúl Camposano (Synopsys), and Jack Harding (Cadence). - The company, founded in 2024 by UC Santa Barbara professor William Wang, has grown from 10 to 46 employees and reports 140x year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth. - ChipAgents' platform is currently in use at 80 semiconductor companies and has demonstrated significant performance gains, including a 240x reduction in formal assertion generation time and a 400x speedup in UVM environment generation. - The company's AI model achieved a 97.4% pass rate on NVIDIA's VerilogEval benchmark, a test that measures an AI's ability to generate correct Verilog hardware description code from natural language specifications. - The funding will be used to scale operations, including a move from its original Goleta location to a new 20,000-square-foot headquarters in Santa Clara, California. - The global market for generative AI in semiconductor design was valued at approximately $1.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to exceed $24 billion by 2033.
