ChipAgents receives $21 million to transform semiconductor design with agentic AI

Santa Barbara-based ChipAgents.ai today announced that it has raised $21 million in early financing to fuel the growth of its artificial intelligence platform for chip design and verification.

Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series A round, with strategic support from Micron Technology Inc., MediaTek Inc., Ericsson and other semiconductor giants. Existing investors ScOp Venture Capital and Amino Capital also participated in the round. The round brings the company's total funding to $24 million.

Professor William Wang, founder and CEO of ChipAgents, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that formal chip design began in the 1980s, when electrical engineers were still working on paper to develop gate architectures. But the advent of AI chips and new system-on-chip designs has pushed the number of logic gates to breathtaking new levels of complexity.

“Chips became so complex that there used to be millions of logic gates, and now there are billions or tens of billions, even trillions of logic gates,” Wang said. “So if you have to design complexity at that particular level, no one understands the code anymore.”

Engineers today use sophisticated tools to visualize and design chip architectures, but legacy software is lagging behind. To address this challenge, ChipAgents has developed an agentic AI platform that automates routine design and verification tasks so engineers can focus on innovation rather than tedious, line-by-line code work.

ChipAgents works on the front end of the chip design and verification process before manufacturing begins. Engineers use it from the earliest stages when defining chip specifications, which can produce PDFs and datasheets containing hundreds of pages.

Wang pointed to companies like Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. as early pioneers of simulation-based chip design and electronic design automation, or EDA, processes that ChipAgents now aims to expand with agent-based AI-driven tools.

Using AI, the platform can help engineers identify inconsistencies or errors by comparing specifications across multiple documents, generating register transfer-level code, and automatically creating documentation. RTL is a hardware design abstraction that describes how digital circuits transmit data and how logic is executed at the hardware level, typically written in hardware description languages ​​such as Verilog or VHDL.

Wang said that with ChipAgents' generative AI capabilities, architecture, design and verification teams can use the tool to streamline workflows and reduce time to market.

One particular use case that dominates the company's platform is verification. Unlike software development, where a developer can simply fix a mistake on the fly, hardware verification requires near-perfection before a chip goes into production because mistakes can cost millions.

“In industry, people spend more time checking the functional correctness of the chip because it's easy to write code. But how do you know that the code you've written is actually correct?” Wang remarked.

He added that there are often two to three verification engineers for every design engineer. ChipAgents accelerates your work by automatically generating test benches, rules and assertions – tasks that could take weeks but can now be completed in minutes. This allows teams to quickly confirm that a chip's implementation meets its specifications.

Although Wang couldn't name customers, he said many of the top 20 semiconductor companies use ChipAgents. Founded in 2024, the company has experienced explosive growth. Usage increased 60-fold in the first half of 2025 from an undisclosed base.

“We see a lot of usage every day and new use cases every day,” Wang said. “I think we are witnessing the transformation of the semiconductor industry towards agent AI solutions for design verification.”

With the new funding, ChipAgents plans to expand its research and development and focus on additional customer support. This will help improve on-site support for semiconductor customers, who often manage multi-million dollar chip projects.

Wang said a key step will be the opening of a new headquarters in Santa Clara to bring the company close to the heart of Silicon Valley, and that it is expected to be operational within weeks. The company's current headquarters in Santa Barbara will continue to be an important research and development center.

“ChipAgents’ agentic approach to AI chip design seamlessly integrates into the entire chip design workflow,” said Lance Co Ting Keh, venture partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Bringing together different EDA tools from specification capture to waveform analysis is, in our opinion, the right way to address this complex, multi-step process.”

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer