Three Ex-Synopsys Engineers, One Trillion-Dollar Bet: Inside CaretEDA's Open Source, AI-Native Approach to Chip Design

Three former Synopsys colleagues have joined forces to launch CaretEDA, a startup betting that agentic AI and open source tools can make chip design faster, cheaper, and more accessible — without compromising the rigor the semiconductor industry demands. In a wide-ranging conversation with EEHerald Chief Editor Srinivasa Reddy N and US Editor Ashish Rao, CaretEDA's three co-founders — CEO Sashi Obilisetty, VP Engineering Radha Srinivasan, and Chief Architect Suraj Prakash Ankush — discussed their journeys into the company, the real-world state of agentic AI in EDA, and why they believe open source has an underappreciated opening in the industry.

Three Journeys, One Startup

Sashi Obilisetty's path to CaretEDA runs through three previous startups — Dualsoft, focused on early RTL analysis and linting, and Very Easy Solutions, built during the era when verification languages such as OpenVera and "e" were competing before System Verilog became the industry standard. She later spent years at Synopsys working on verification products including VCS and formal tools, built and led the company's AI team starting around 2015, helped grow chip design on Google Cloud, and returned to Synopsys to work on post-silicon technology before the rise of large language models convinced her it was "criminal not to start a company."

Radh...