Cognichip, a Redwood City, CA-based company providing ACI (Artificial Chip Intelligence) for semiconductor design, has raised $60 milion in a Series A funding round led by Seligman Ventures.
The round also saw participation from SBI Investment and additional semiconductor-focused investors. Other participants in the round included Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and former semiconductor company CEO, and Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, who also joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors. The raise brought the total amount to $93M.
The company plans to use the funds to grow its operations and development work.
The oversubscribed investment in Cognichip, a leader in AI-driven chip design, shows that the semiconductor industry recognizes that small improvements are no longer enough. As chips become more complex—spanning digital, analogue, mixed-signal, and advanced-node designs—the tools and infrastructure for designing and manufacturing semiconductors must evolve just as much.
Unlike other AI approaches that use basic layers over general-purpose LLMs, Cognichip’s ACI® is the industry’s only full-stack AI design solution. It combines advanced cognitive capabilities, unified planning, unlimited context management, efficient operations, and secure deployment for chip design.
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AI is advancing rapidly, but the chips that run it still take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to design. This creates a bottleneck AI growth is limited by hardware, but hardware can’t keep up. Cognichip is changing this by rethinking how chips are designed and built.
Cognichip introduced ACI® – Artificial Chip Intelligence – an AI that understands and solves chip design problems with designer-level skills. Using a physics-informed foundation model, ACI® combines logic and physics reasoning to handle complex designs and turn traditional step-by-step workflows into fast, adaptive, and automated processes. This lets engineers act as architects while ACI® handles technical execution, cutting time, cost, and complexity.
Cognichip shortens design cycles from months to days, cuts costs by 75%, and optimizes power, performance, and area, making chips faster, cheaper, and easier to produce.
Lip-Bu Tan, a visionary venture capitalist and technology executive who shaped the modern semiconductor industry, has joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors, bringing unmatched leadership experience. As former CEO of Cadence Design Systems, he led its rise as a global leader in computational engineering software and as CEO of Intel, he operates at the intersection of semiconductor manufacturing, design, and AI innovation.
Tan reunites with Cognichip Founder & CEO Faraj Aalaei, with whom he collaborated over three decades at Aquantia and Centillium Communications, achieving two successful IPOs. Together again, they aim to transform the semiconductor industry with an AI-first design approach. “The semiconductor industry is at a critical point; AI-driven innovation and efficiency will unlock enormous opportunities,” said Tan. “Cognichip’s physics informed foundation model and experienced leadership team position it to become a generational company.”
Joining the board is also Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and veteran semiconductor executive, who has served on the boards of top companies including Integrated Device Technology, Elantec Semiconductor, Mellanox Technologies, Monolithic Power Systems, and P.A. Semi.
“Chip design cycles have grown longer, creating major productivity bottlenecks,” said Padval. “The next leap will not come from small improvements, but from AI enabling parallel, highly automated design. Cognichip is building that foundation with physics-informed models, curated datasets and seamless integration with design tools. Faraj and his team, combining AI, chip design and system architecture expertise, are redefining how chips are designed in the AI era.”
“Cognichip’s ACI® is the key intelligence layer for next-generation AI chips, expected to cut design costs by up to 75% and shorten timelines by 50%,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of SBI Holdings. “Our investment in Cognichip complements SBI’s other semiconductor investments, and we believe ACI® will transform the economics of the industry.”
About Cognichip
Founded in 2024, by Faraj Aalaei, Ehsan Kamalinejad, and Simon Sabato, Cognichip is developing the world’s first Artificial Chip Intelligence (ACI®) to transform chip design, tackling high costs and slow development with a team from Amazon, Google, Apple, Aquantia, Synopsys, and KLA. Backed by $93 million from Seligman Ventures, SBI Investment, Mayfield, Lux Capital, and Candou Ventures, ACI® cuts design cycles by 50%, lowers costs by 75%, optimises performance, and makes advanced semiconductor technology faster, cheaper, and more accessible to innovators.
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