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ChipAgents, the category leader for Agentic AI platforms in the semiconductor design industry, announced it has closed an oversubscribed $50 million Series A1 funding round, bringing total capital raised to $74 million. The round was led by Matter Venture Partners, a TSMC-backed HardTech VC firm, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson.
As part of the investment, Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner of Matter VP, will join ChipAgents' Board of Directors, bringing over two decades of expertise and relationships in semiconductor design and manufacturing.
Building the AI Workforce for Chip Design Companies
This new capital will enable ChipAgents to aggressively scale its Agentic AI platform, expand its engineering and research organization, and accelerate global deployment of multi-agent chip teams. ChipAgents is building the foundational AI infrastructure for chip design, with coordinated AI Agents that can plan, reason, execute, and continuously improve across complex silicon programs. By transforming chip development into an AI-native, outcome-driven system, ChipAgents is redefining semiconductor innovations.
“We’re building an Agentic AI workforce for the semiconductor industry,” said William Wang, CEO and Founder of ChipAgents. “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. This is not incremental productivity software. It’s a revolutionary AI execution platform for silicon design.”
“As chip complexity explodes and experienced chip design talent becomes the limiting factor, the future will belong to hybrid human-AI teams with the best AI Agent infrastructure,” Wang added. “ChipAgents enables small IC design teams to operate like much larger organizations that can move at startup speed. This funding accelerates our mission to make AI-driven chip innovations the default model for how all silicon will be designed, built, and shipped.”
Strategic Partnership with Industry Leaders
The investment by Matter Venture Partners, a VC firm with deep roots across the global semiconductor ecosystem, reinforces confidence in ChipAgents’ vision to build the Agentic AI platform powering the next generation of silicon innovation. With leading foundries fabricating the vast majority of the world’s most advanced chips, alignment with investors embedded in this ecosystem positions ChipAgents at the center of a structural shift toward AI-native chip development.
"The semiconductor industry is entering a phase where the limits to chip design productivity are no longer the tools themselves," said Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner of Matter Venture Partners. "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. As the AI ecosystem demands increasingly complex, higher-performing silicon, we believe ChipAgents will be essential for any chip company that wants to shape the future of AI and compute.”
Market Momentum and Customer Traction
Building on the momentum of its Series A that was completed a few months ago, ChipAgents has achieved 140x year-over-year ARR growth and has expanded deployments to 80 leading semiconductor companies, securing several multi-year, multi-million-dollar licensing agreements. The team has scaled from 10 to 46 employees and relocated its headquarters from Santa Barbara to a new state-of-the-art facility in Santa Clara, placing the company at the center of the global semiconductor ecosystem. Across Tier-1 semiconductor programs in live production environments, ChipAgents is delivering step-function performance gains:
- 15x faster specification reading and comprehension
- 240x reduction in formal assertion generation time
- 100% code and functional coverage through formal verification
- 400x faster UVM environment generation
These results translate into significantly compressed verification cycles, full design visibility, and a new level of execution velocity across complex digital IC design programs, enabling teams to ship more silicon with greater speed, confidence and control.
World-Class Advisory Board Expands
Sandeep Bharathi, President of Marvell’s Data Center Group, joined ChipAgents’ Advisory Board, bringing over two decades of experience leading chip development for hyperscale cloud and enterprise infrastructure. His expertise in scaling complex SoC programs from design through high-volume production will help guide ChipAgents through its rapid growth.
“Semiconductor development continues to grow in complexity as systems scale across cloud and enterprise infrastructure. The industry must 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 as it advances this mission,” said Sandeep Bharathi.
Bharathi joins an advisory board that already includes Wally Rhines, former CEO of Mentor Graphics (now Siemens EDA); Raúl Camposano, former CTO of Synopsys; Jack Harding, former CEO of Cadence; John Bowers, Electrical Engineering pioneer, and Erez Tsur, former CEO of Cadence Israel.
