Chipmind secures $2.5M for its AI agents to speed chip making

Chipmind, a European startup building AI agents to accelerate the development of microchips, has raised USD 2.5 million in its pre-seed round, led by Founderful with participation of prominent angel investors from the semiconductor industry. This investment allows Chipmind to expand its world-class engineering team, accelerate product development, and deepen its engagements with key industry players, the company said.

Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Chipmind has also launched Chipmind Agents, optimized to empower engineering teams in semiconductor companies to speed up the path from specification to chip manufacturing. 

Chipmind Agents are a new class of AI agents designed to automate and optimize the most complex chip design and verification tasks. Uniquely built upon each customer’s own proprietary, design-specific data, these agents seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, intelligently self-adapting to the specific design context, auto-customizing for proprietary EDA tools, and understanding the entire chip design hierarchy, according to a media release. 

Functioning as a fully aware and collaborative co-worker, Chipmind Agents enhance engineering productivity by autonomously executing complex, multi-step tasks while ensuring the human engineer always remains in full control. This holistic and purpose-built approach is designed to dramatically reduce time-to-solve cycles within any custom chip design environment, empowering teams to achieve results faster.

“Our ‘design-aware’ agents are engineered to holistically understand the entire chip context, not just the surrounding tools,” said Harald Kröll, Co-Founder and CEO of Chipmind. “We’ve found this deep awareness is the key that unlocks productivity, translating directly into significant time savings on the most complex tasks, all while integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.”

 “Anyone who’s spent time in chip development knows how much of the work is repetitive and time-consuming, demanding precision but not necessarily creativity,” said Sandro Belfanti, Co-Founder and CTO of Chipmind. “Throughout my career developing chips at top-tier semiconductor companies, I’ve often wished for a solution that could magically take care of those tedious tasks so I could focus on solving real engineering challenges. With Chipmind Agents, we’re finally bringing that solution to life: AI agents that can autonomously handle the boring parts, letting engineers focus on what truly matters: innovation.”