Cognichip raises $60M to automate semiconductor design

Cognichip, a startup building a deep learning model to assist engineers in designing computer chips, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $60 million in new funding. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman. Both Tan and Padval will join Cognichip’s board. This latest round brings the startup’s total funding to $93 million since its founding in 2024.

The company claims its technology can reduce chip development costs by more than 75% and cut timelines by more than half. Currently, designing physical silicon is a slow and capital-intensive process. Advanced chips typically take three to five years to go from conception to mass production, with the design phase alone taking as long as two years before physical layout begins. For context, Blackwell—the GPU architecture developed by Nvidia—contains 104 billion transistors. While Cognichip aims to streamline this process, the company cannot yet point to a new chip designed with its system, and it has not disclosed the customers it has been collaborating with since September.

To train its models, Cognichip had to develop its own datasets, including synthetic data, and license data from partners, rather than relying on general-purpose large language models. Because chip designers closely guard their intellectual property, open-source training data is scarce. Where private data was unavailable, the company used open-source alternatives. In a demo last year, students at San Jose State University participated in a hackathon using Cognichip’s model to design CPUs based on RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture.

Cognichip enters a crowded market. It faces competition from established industry incumbents as well as newly funded startups:

• Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems: Longtime industry incumbents in the chip design software space.
• Ricursive: A startup that raised a $300 million Series A round in January.
• ChipAgents: A competitor that closed a $74 million extended Series A funding round in February.

Despite the competition, backers see a massive opportunity. Padval, drawing on 40 years of investing experience, noted that the current influx of capital into AI infrastructure is the largest he has seen. “If it’s a super cycle for semiconductors and hardware, it’s a super cycle for companies like [Cognichip],” Padval said.

Why it matters

Cognichip is attempting to apply AI to the complex and expensive semiconductor design process, aiming to significantly reduce development costs and timelines.