Cognichip

Cognichip is building the intelligence layer for the entire semiconductor industry. Its platform — Artificial Chip Intelligence, or ACI® — is a physics-informed foundation model that can understand, reason about, and solve chip design problems with designer-level cognitive ability. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Redwood City, California (with a Toronto office opened in late 2025), Cognichip was built by veterans from Amazon, Google, Apple, Synopsys, and KLA who understand chip design's core problem: modern chips take 3-5 years and over $200M to design, the process is brutally serial, and as AI demands accelerate silicon complexity, the design bottleneck is becoming existential for the industry. CEO and founder Faraj Aalaei (a third-time founder) built ACI® as a physics-informed foundation model — not an incremental EDA tool improvement — that fuses logic and physics-based reasoning to navigate the entire chip design space simultaneously. The result compresses design cycles from months to days, reduces costs by 75%, and optimizes power, performance, and area in ways no prior tool could achieve. Over 30 semiconductor companies, including many of the top 20 global chip leaders, are engaged with ACI®. Cognichip emerged from stealth in May 2025 with $33M in seed from Lux Capital and Mayfield. By April 2026, it closed an oversubscribed $60M Series A led by Seligman Ventures — with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan personally investing and joining the board alongside Umesh Padval (Seligman Ventures). All seed investors participated above pro rata. Total raised: $93M. Fast Company named Cognichip to its World's Most Innovative Companies of 2026 list. With $93M raised, Intel CEO on the board, and a wedge into a market that hasn't seen foundational change in decades, Cognichip is building the defining AI company for semiconductor design.