Cognichip has raised $60 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from SBI Investment and several semiconductor-focused investors. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $93 million and underscores growing industry interest in AI-driven approaches to semiconductor design.
As part of the funding, Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures, and Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, have joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors. Their appointments bring significant industry experience spanning chip design, manufacturing, and computational engineering.
The investment reflects a broader shift within the semiconductor ecosystem, where rising chip complexity and extended design cycles are driving demand for more advanced design methodologies. Traditional approaches, often characterized by sequential workflows, have struggled to keep pace with increasing requirements across digital, analog, and mixed-signal designs, particularly at advanced process nodes.
Cognichip is positioning itself at the forefront of this transition with its proprietary ACI® (Artificial Chip Intelligence) platform. The technology leverages physics-informed AI models to optimize semiconductor design processes, enabling more efficient navigation of complex design parameters. By integrating domain-specific datasets with advanced AI capabilities, the platform aims to transform traditionally serial design workflows into parallel, automated processes.
According to company executives and investors, this approach could significantly reduce both design timelines and costs. Estimates suggest that ACI® has the potential to cut semiconductor design costs by up to 75% and reduce development timelines by as much as 50%, while maintaining performance and manufacturability standards.
Industry veterans backing the company highlight the need for fundamental innovation rather than incremental improvements in design tools. Umesh Padval noted that the next phase of semiconductor advancement will depend on leveraging AI to parallelize chip design processes, addressing long-standing productivity bottlenecks.
Similarly, Lip-Bu Tan emphasized the importance of combining deep domain expertise with advanced AI research to unlock new opportunities in the semiconductor sector. Tan’s involvement also marks a renewed collaboration with Cognichip founder and CEO Faraj Aalaei, with whom he has previously worked on successful ventures.
Founded in 2024, Cognichip has spent the past two years building a multidisciplinary team of semiconductor engineers and AI researchers. The company has developed a large, curated dataset encompassing design, verification, and manufacturing constraints, forming the foundation for its AI models.
Unlike approaches that rely on general-purpose large language models, Cognichip’s system is designed as a full-stack solution, integrating planning, orchestration, and execution capabilities tailored specifically for chip design environments.
The company is currently engaging with more than 30 semiconductor firms, including several of the industry’s top players, across digital, analog, and foundry segments. These collaborations are aimed at validating the technology in real-world production environments.
