ChipAgents has closed an oversubscribed $50 million Series A1 round, bringing its total funding to $74 million. The round was led by Matter Venture Partners, a TSMC-backed HardTech venture firm, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson.

As part of the deal, Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner of Matter Venture Partners, will join ChipAgents’ Board of Directors. He brings more than two decades of experience in semiconductor design and manufacturing, deepening the company’s ties to the global chip ecosystem.

Why Chip Design Needs a New Approach

The semiconductor industry is under pressure from two directions. Chip designs are getting more complex, while the pool of experienced engineers is not growing fast enough to keep up. Verification alone can consume more than 70% of a project’s total development time. For many teams, schedule overruns and engineering bottlenecks are the norm.

AI tooling has existed in EDA for years, but most tools function as assistants that support engineers rather than systems that act independently. ChipAgents is building something different: coordinated AI agents that take ownership of tasks, work in parallel, and iterate continuously, with the goal of compressing design cycles and reducing the talent burden on human teams.

“The semiconductor industry is entering a phase where the limits to chip design productivity are no longer the tools themselves. The limits are now talent availability, human bandwidth and design iteration speed. ChipAgents addresses this constraint directly with an Agentic AI platform capable of significantly scaling engineering and design capacity alongside advanced manufacturing progress.”

Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner, Matter Venture Partners

What the Funding Will Build

The new capital will go toward scaling ChipAgents’ engineering and research teams, accelerating the global rollout of its multi-agent platform, and expanding its presence across major semiconductor markets. The company relocated its headquarters from Santa Barbara to a new 20,000 sq ft facility in Santa Clara, putting it squarely inside the world’s most concentrated chip ecosystem.

Longer term, ChipAgents is building toward a model where AI agents handle the full arc of chip development, from reading specifications and generating verification environments to running formal checks and debugging failures. The aim is not to replace engineers but to let small IC design teams move at the speed and scale of organizations several times their size.

“We’re building an Agentic AI workforce for the semiconductor industry. Our multi-agent AI teams are not just copilots or AI assistants; they actually take ownership. They read specifications, break down objectives, discuss and implement solutions, validate results, and iterate relentlessly.”

William Wang, CEO and Founder, ChipAgents

About ChipAgents

Founded in 2024, ChipAgents is an Agentic AI platform that converts specifications and code into production-ready RTL, verification assets, and automated root-cause analysis. Its systems are already in active use at 80 leading semiconductor companies, with several clients signed to multi-year, multi-million-dollar licensing agreements.

The results in live production environments speak clearly. The platform delivers a 15x speedup in specification reading, a 240x reduction in formal assertion generation time, and a 400x improvement in UVM environment generation. Full code and functional coverage through formal verification is now achievable at a fraction of the previous cost.

The company has grown from 10 to 46 employees in a short period, with ARR climbing 140x year over year. CEO and Founder William Wang leads the team, supported by an Advisory Board that includes Wally Rhines (former CEO of Mentor Graphics), Raúl Camposano (former CTO of Synopsys), Jack Harding (former CEO of Cadence), John Bowers, and Erez Tsur (former CEO of Cadence Israel). Sandeep Bharathi, President of Marvell’s Data Center Group, recently joined the board, bringing over two decades of experience scaling complex SoC programs from design through high-volume production.

Investors and Funding History

The Series A1 was led by Matter Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley-based HardTech VC firm with deep roots in the semiconductor and Physical AI ecosystem. The round builds on prior backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson, all of which returned for this round, signaling continued confidence in the company’s direction.

ChipAgents has now raised a total of $74 million across its funding history. The round closed oversubscribed, reflecting strong demand from investors who see the chip design productivity problem as both urgent and addressable at scale.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/chipagents-raises-74m-for-agentic-chip-design-ai/
Originally Posted: Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:38:10 +0000