Cadence Acquires Seattle AI Startup ChipStack to Accelerate Chip Design Automation

Cadence to acquire Seattle startup ChipStack to boost chip design automation

Semiconductor software giant Cadence Design Systems agreed to acquire ChipStack, a Seattle-based startup developing AI tools to speed up chip verification and design. ChipStack emerged from Seattle's AI2 Incubator in 2023 and raised more than $7 million. The startup built AI-powered agents that automate chip verification -- traditionally one of the most time-intensive steps in semiconductor design. The entire 20-person team is joining San Jose, Calif.-based Cadence, which said the acquisition will strengthen its AI-driven verification capabilities. Cadence and ChipStack previously partnered on various integrations. Financial details were not disclosed, but investors saw a strong return on the deal, according to a spokesperson for ChipStack. The company's investors include AI2 Incubator, Khosla Ventures, Cerberus Capital Management, Clear Ventures, and other angels. ChipStack CEO and co-founder Kartik Hegde earned his PhD in computer science from University of Illinois in 2022 and had internships at Meta and NVIDIA. He founded ChipStack wtih CTO Hamid Shojaei, who previously worked at Lightmatter, Google, and Qualcomm. "As ChipStack's product adoption has grown, so has our ambition and vision," Hedge wrote on LinkedIn. "When the opportunity came to join Cadence, it was clear to us that this is the best way to take our product to a wider audience, while expanding the feature set even faster." Jacob Colker, managing director at AI2 Incubator, described the founders as "elite AI talent building the next wave of companies -- deep technical expertise meeting real-world impact." "They've built agentic AI that solves one of chip design's biggest bottlenecks, accelerating verification by 70%," he said in a statement. "This is exactly the kind of applied AI innovation that defines this new era of entrepreneurship."

Cadence Design : Welcomes ChipStack

ChipStack, a leading startup providing agentic AI solutions for chip verification, and Cadence have announced an agreement for ChipStack to join the agentic AI team at Cadence. Founded by technologists with deep expertise in both AI and semiconductor design, ChipStack's generative AI-driven platform helps accelerate design and verification workflows through deep design understanding, intelligent test planning, test generation, and AI-assisted debugging. This acquisition builds on the existing multi-year collaboration between Cadence and ChipStack, which integrated Cadence's Xcelium Logic Simulator, Jasper Formal Verification Platform, and other industry-leading front-end verification technologies with ChipStack's platform. The addition of ChipStack's talented team and technology further strengthens Cadence's AI platform and silicon agents. By embedding ChipStack's AI agents into the Cadence full-flow verification solutions, customers can move from weeks to days in functional verification, scale productivity without proportional headcount, and shorten their time to market for critical projects. ChipStack's technology is deployed at many leading chip teams, and Cadence is committed to maintaining and expanding ChipStack's offerings and roadmap without interruptions, now backed by Cadence's global support, security, and infrastructure. Over time, these capabilities will be seamlessly integrated into Cadence's full-flow verification portfolio, ensuring customers gain the full benefit of a unified, AI-powered solution with the same experience and trust they've built with ChipStack. We are delighted to welcome the entire ChipStack team to Cadence and look forward to driving the next generation of AI-driven chip design automation together.