Cognichip, the company pioneering ACI® – Artificial Chip Intelligence – for semiconductor design, today announced an oversubscribed $60 million Series A financing led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from SBI Investment and additional semiconductor-focused investors.
All seed investors, including Mayfield, Lux Capital, FPV, and Candou Ventures, participated above pro rata allocations, bringing the company’s total funding to $93 million. As part of the financing, Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and former semiconductor company CEO, has joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors. Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, who also participated in the round, joins Cognichip’s Board of Directors.
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The oversubscribed investment into Cognichip as the pioneering leader in this transition to AI-enabled chip design reflects growing recognition across the semiconductor ecosystem that incremental improvements are no longer sufficient. As chip complexity increases across digital, analog, mixed-signal, and advanced-node designs, the infrastructure required to design and manufacture semiconductors must evolve just as fundamentally.
Semiconductor Veterans Back Cognichip’s Approach
Lip-Bu Tan, the visionary venture capitalist and technology executive who pioneered the modern semiconductor ecosystem, brings unparalleled leadership experience to Cognichip’s Board of Directors. As former CEO of Cadence Design Systems, he led the company’s transformation into a global leader in computational engineering software. As CEO of Intel, Tan operates at the intersection of global semiconductor manufacturing, design infrastructure, and transformative AI.
The appointment marks a high-profile reunion between Tan and Cognichip Founder & CEO Faraj Aalaei. The duo previously collaborated over the last three decades at Aquantia and Centillium Communications, where Tan served on the board under Aalaei’s leadership, a partnership that culminated in two successful IPOs. By joining Cognichip, Tan reunites with a proven chief executive to once again disrupt a mature industry with a transformative, AI-first architectural blueprint.
“The semiconductor industry is at a critical juncture; an AI framework for innovation and efficiency will unlock massive global opportunity,” said Lip-BuTan. “Success in this space requires a rare fusion of deep domain expertise combined with advanced AI research and an end-to-end integrated design approach. Cognichip’s groundbreaking, physics-informed foundation model technology and proven leadership team position it to become a generational company.”
Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and veteran semiconductor company CEO, was a board member of leading deep-tech companies, including Integrated Device Technology (acquired by Renesas Electronics), Mellanox Technologies (acquired by NVIDIA), Monolithic Power Systems, and P.A. Semi (acquired by Apple). He emphasized the importance of execution and domain depth.
“Semiconductor design cycles have steadily lengthened over the past several decades, creating a major productivity bottleneck for the industry,” said Umesh Padval. “The next wave of progress to significantly reduce the chip design cycles will not come from incremental optimization of existing design tools, but from using AI to parallelize what has historically been a highly serial chip design process. Cognichip is building the foundation for that shift through physics-informed models, curated datasets, and production-ready integration with the semiconductor design stack. Faraj is a third-time founder who has assembled a uniquely complementary team spanning leading-edge AI, chip design, and system architecture, and we’re excited to partner with them as they redefine how chips are designed in the AI era.”
Expanding this coalition of semiconductor and infrastructure investors, Japan-based SBI Investment brings a global perspective on the future of compute and AI hardware. With a growing portfolio across next-generation semiconductor and AI companies, SBI’s investment reflects a shared conviction that advancing AI will require fundamentally rethinking how chips are designed, built, and deployed.
“Cognichip’s ACI® serves as the essential intelligence layer for the next-generation AI semiconductors. It is expected to reduce design costs by as much as 75% and cut timelines by 50%,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, Chairman, President & CEO of SBI Holdings. “SBI’s investment in Cognichip aligns with its existing investments in Preferred Networks, Tenstorrent, Majestic Labs, and EdgeCortix. We are firmly convinced that Cognichip’s ACI® innovation will fundamentally transform the economics of the semiconductor industry.”
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