Cognichip Raises $60 Million Series A for Physics-Informed AI in Semiconductor Design

Cognichip 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. The round brings 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, joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors. Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, who participated in the round, also joined the Board of Directors.

 

Cognichip is developing ACI – Artificial Chip Intelligence – a full-stack AI-enabled solution for semiconductor design. The company states that its physics-informed foundation model technology fuses logic and physics-based reasoning to transform traditional serial chip design workflows into concurrent, adaptive, and automated processes.

 

Cognichip was founded in 2024 by semiconductor and AI veterans from companies including Amazon, Google, Apple, Aquantia, Synopsys, and KLA. Over the past two years, the company built a team combining chip architects with frontier AI scientists and created a dataset based on complex design, verification, and manufacturing constraints...