
Cognichip is an AI-first company revolutionizing semiconductor design with its Artificial Chip Intelligence (ACI)® platform. ACI® is the world's first physics-informed foundation AI model tailored for chip design, aiming to fundamentally reshape its economics. The platform promises a 75% reduction in design effort, 50% faster completion, and elimination of excessive chip size and power. Cognichip addresses a critical bottleneck in hardware development, where chip design takes 3-5 years compared to rapid AI software innovation. Their approach is AI-first, physics-informed, human-centered, and built for speed, democratizing chip design and allowing chips to keep pace with software advancements. The company was founded by experts from Amazon, Google, Apple, Aquantia, and Synopsys, and has raised $33 million in seed funding from investors including Mayfield, Lux Capital, FPV, and Candou Ventures. Cognichip is leading the AI disruption in the legacy chip design industry.

Cognichip is an AI-first company revolutionizing semiconductor design with its Artificial Chip Intelligence (ACI)® platform. ACI® is the world's first physics-informed foundation AI model tailored for chip design, aiming to fundamentally reshape its economics. The platform promises a 75% reduction in design effort, 50% faster completion, and elimination of excessive chip size and power. Cognichip addresses a critical bottleneck in hardware development, where chip design takes 3-5 years compared to rapid AI software innovation. Their approach is AI-first, physics-informed, human-centered, and built for speed, democratizing chip design and allowing chips to keep pace with software advancements. The company was founded by experts from Amazon, Google, Apple, Aquantia, and Synopsys, and has raised $33 million in seed funding from investors including Mayfield, Lux Capital, FPV, and Candou Ventures. Cognichip is leading the AI disruption in the legacy chip design industry.
Core product: ACI® — a physics-informed foundation AI model for semiconductor chip design
Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
Seed funding: $33M (May 2025)
Founding team: Faraj Aalaei, Ehsan Kamalinejad, Mehdi Daneshpanah, Simon Sabato
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Semiconductor chip design — long, expensive hardware development cycles and suboptimal size/power tradeoffs.
2024
DeepTech
$33,000,000
Round included participation from FPV Ventures and Candou Ventures; disclosed when company emerged from stealth.
“Led by institutional deep‑tech investors (Lux Capital and Mayfield) with participation from FPV Ventures and Candou Ventures”
Mission
Design agentic workflows, prompts, and domain knowledge that enable AI agents to perform production-quality chip design and verification. This role focuses on encoding deep silicon expertise: microarchitecture, RTL, DV, and EDA workflows - into structured agent behaviors, playbooks, and tool-aware processes.
Core Responsibilities
Domain Knowledge & Tool Enablement
Agent Workflow & Orchestration
Prompt Engineering & Agent Behavior
Required Experience
10+ years of experience (Staff) OR 6+ years of experience (Senior) across key domains:
Chip Design & Verification
Digital IC, ASIC, or SoC design or verification, with strong hands-on expertise in SystemVerilog RTL and UVM. Deep familiarity with lint, CDC/RDC, simulation, timing constraints, and STA, and a solid understanding of microarchitecture (pipelines, FIFOs, DMA, caches, interconnects). Ability to clearly explain design tradeoffs and debugging strategies.
Agentic AI & Software
Experience with LLM-based agent systems, prompt engineering, and workflow decomposition. Familiarity with agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, AutoGen, or CrewAI, or equivalent custom systems. Proficiency in Python and experience integrating external tools into automated workflows.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with formal verification, PPA analysis, or timing signoff; background in defining chip-design methodologies; experience building agent playbooks, few-shot libraries, or domain knowledge bases; and contributions to open-source EDA, AI, or agentic tooling.
What we Offer