ChipAgents raises $60M to accelerate AI chip design, expands Nvidia partnership

Nvidia partner ChipAgents raises $60 million to accelerate chip design with AI agents

LONG BEACH, California, July 29 (Reuters) - Chip design startup ChipAgents expanded its Series A financing with a $60 million infusion to further fund its plans to speed up semiconductor design through the use of AI agents, its chief executive said. ChipAgents builds software that harnesses so-called AI agents - programs capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight - to make the complex, lengthy process of chip design ⁠faster and more automated. Designing chips can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years using traditional tools and methods. But in recent months, a batch of startups has surfaced with the promise of using AI to tackle some of the thorniest, costliest parts of the chip design process. ChipAgents sees the largest speedup in design with the company's software that is designed to help verify a chip will ⁠function as intended, CEO William Wang told Reuters in an interview. "A big part of that is actually making sure there are no bugs," Wang said. Chip design software companies such as Cadence (CDNS.O), opens new tab and Synopsys (SNPS.O), opens new tab have built AI into ⁠their software and launched their own agent products. Earlier this week, ChipAgents said it was expanding its strategic collaboration with Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab to include developing ChipAgents' specialized ⁠AI model, which focuses on chip design. Wang declined to say whether Nvidia was an investor. B Capital led the additional funding round, which ⁠brings its fundraising total to $131 million. Prior investors include Micron (MU.O), opens new tab, MediaTek (2454.TW), opens new tab and Ericsson. ChipAgents has about 64 employees and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Reporting by Max A. Cherney; Editing by Jamie Freed Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Disrupted Max A. Cherney Thomson Reuters Max A. Cherney is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where he reports on the semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence. He joined Reuters in 2023 and has previously worked for Barron's magazine and its sister publication, MarketWatch. Cherney graduated from Trent University with a degree in history.

Nvidia partner ChipAgents raises $60M for agentic chip design

The Nvidia partner, whose agents automate the slow work of verifying semiconductors, has now raised around $134m as investors pile into AI-for-EDA. ChipAgents, a startup building AI agents that design and test semiconductors, has raised $60 million. The company, a partner of Nvidia, is betting that the same agentic AI reshaping software can be turned on the painstaking business of making chips. The raise adds to an already busy year. ChipAgents closed a $21 million Series A last October and a $50 million round in February, so the latest cheque takes its total funding to roughly $134 million in under a year, a pace that tracks the wider rush into AI-native chip-design tools. "We're enabling the industry to move beyond AI assistants toward autonomous agents that can execute meaningful engineering work," said William Wang, CEO and Founder, ChipAgents. The company's product sits in a corner of the industry known as EDA. Electronic design automation is the software engineers use to lay out and verify chips, a market long dominated by a handful of incumbents, and the one ChipAgents wants to rebuild around autonomous agents rather than human-driven tools. Verification is the bottleneck it is aiming at. Checking that a chip actually does what it is supposed to can eat more than 70% of a design project's time, and ChipAgents says its agents can read a specification, write the tests, run them, and iterate without an engineer holding their hand at each step. The claims are bold, as they tend to be. The company says its agents comprehend specifications many times faster than people and generate formal checks almost instantly, and that the platform is already in production at several chipmakers, though those figures come from the company rather than any independent audit. Its founder frames it as a change of model. William Wang, ChipAgents' chief executive, describes agents that "read specifications, break down objectives, discuss and implement solutions, validate results and iterate relentlessly," a pitch for software that does the job rather than assists the person doing it. The company is the product of Alpha Design AI, based in San Jose with research roots near Santa Barbara. Wang, an academic turned founder, has leaned on that pedigree to recruit both talent and early customers. The investor base has been heavy on strategics. Earlier rounds drew in Bessemer Venture Partners alongside chip-world names including Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson, the kind of backers whose interest doubles as a signal that the technology is being taken seriously inside the industry. The Nvidia label is the eye-catching part. Reuters cast ChipAgents as an Nvidia partner, a useful association in a market where Nvidia's chips and software sit at the centre of the AI boom, even if the exact terms of the relationship were not spelled out. It is not alone in the idea. A wave of startups is pitching AI at different layers of the silicon stack, from Oxmiq's chip architecture to Kandou's interconnects, and agentic design tools are the newest front in that competition. The logic is almost recursive. AI needs ever more chips, chips are slow and costly to design, and so the industry is reaching for AI to design the chips that will run more AI, a loop that investors have found hard to resist. The incumbents are not standing still, which is the risk. The established EDA vendors have their own AI features and deep ties to every major chipmaker, and a startup promising to replace their tools has to prove its agents are reliable enough to trust with silicon that costs millions to fabricate. That trust is the real product. For all the talk of speed, what ChipAgents has to sell is the confidence that an agent's verification can be believed, and $60 million more is the market's wager that it can get there. The broader bet, shared across a field of AI-agent startups, is that agents will soon do skilled technical work, not merely talk about it.

ChipAgents raises $60 million, expands Nvidia partnership

ChipAgents announced an additional $60 million in Series A2 financing on Wednesday, bringing its total Series A funding to $134 million, as the chip design software company also expanded its partnership with Nvidia $NVDA. B Capital led the new round, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron $MU, MediaTek, and Ericsson also participating, the company said. The financing comes six months after ChipAgents closed its initial Series A. Earlier this week, ChipAgents said it was expanding its collaboration with Nvidia to include development of a specialized AI model focused on chip design, according to Reuters. Chief executive officer William Wang declined to say whether Nvidia is an investor. The company's platform deploys AI agents -- autonomous programs that can weigh options and carry out intricate tasks without significant human intervention -- to streamline and automate the workflows involved in semiconductor design and verification, the company said. The platform reduces design cycles by more than 50%, the company said, compressing engineering tasks that once required months or weeks into days or hours. "We're enabling the industry to move beyond AI assistants toward autonomous agents that can execute meaningful engineering work," William Wang said in a statement. "Our customer growth shows that semiconductor companies are ready for that shift, and this financing allows us to bring that capability to even more engineering teams." The new funding follows a strong first half of 2026, during which the company reported 6x growth in annual recurring revenue and deployments at more than 120 semiconductor companies, including MediaTek and Micron, the company said. ChipAgents was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company said it plans to use the proceeds to scale customer deployments, expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, and accelerate product development. ChipAgents has about 64 employees, according to Reuters. "ChipAgents has demonstrated the rare combination of breakthrough AI innovation and exceptional commercial execution," Daisy Cai, general partner at B Capital, said in a statement. "ChipAgents has translated cutting-edge AI research into a platform that customers are deploying in production." Traditional chip design methods can demand hundreds of millions of dollars and stretch across multiple years. Several startups have entered the market in recent months, each positioning AI as a way to cut time and cost out of the most demanding stages of chip development.