The Next Step in AI-Powered Chip Design

Cognichip, a startup that aims to use AI to design the chips that power AI, has raised $60 million in new funding. The company's technology can reduce the cost of chip development by more than 75% and cut the timeline by more than half, according to CEO Faraj Aalaei.

With the help of its new funding, Cognichip plans to continue developing its deep learning model, which is designed to work alongside engineers as they design new computer chips. The problem it is trying to solve is one the industry has lived with for decades: chip design is enormously complex, ruinously expensive, and slow.

The company's advantage is in using its own model trained on chip design data, rather than starting with a general-purpose LLM. This required getting access to domain-specific training data, which is no small feat. Unlike software developers, who share vast amounts of code openly, chip designers guard their IP closely, making the kind of open-source trove that typically trains AI coding assistants largely unavailable.

Cognichip has had to develop its own data sets, including synthetic data, and license data from partners. The firm has also developed procedures to allow chipmakers to securely train Cognichip’s models on their own proprietary data without exposing it.

In one demo last year, Cognichip invited electrical engineering students at San Jose State University to try the model in a hackathon. The teams were able to use the model to design CPUs based on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture — a freely available design that anyone can build on.

Cognichip is competing against incumbent players like Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems, as well as a crop of well-funded startups. Among them: Alpha Design AI, which raised $21 million Series A in October 2025, and ChipAgentsAI, which closed a $74 million extended Series A in February.

"If it's a super cycle for semiconductors and hardware, it's a super cycle for companies like [Cognichip]," said Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman Ventures.

Cognichip has now raised $93 million altogether since its founding in 2024. The company says it can't yet point to a new chip designed with its system and did not disclose any of the customers it says it has been collaborating with since September.