Agentrys Raises $19.1M Seed to Automate Chip Design
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Agentrys has announced $24.5 million in total funding, made up of an oversubscribed $19.1 million seed round led by Etna Labs and an earlier $5.4 million pre seed led by MediaTek, the company’s first strategic backer.
The company works on automating and continuously improving chip design from San Jose, California. Its founder, Mark Ren, spent nearly three decades in electronic design automation and AI research across NVIDIA Research and IBM Research, including leading ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model built for chip design.
The problem is easy to state and hard to solve. Chip design has rarely mattered more economically, yet the work still leans on a small pool of scarce experts and thousands of manual engineering hours per chip.
Agentrys is calling its answer Agentic Design Automation, a category it argues moves past traditional EDA tools aimed at individual tasks toward systems that automate entire engineering workflows, learn from them, and improve over time. The stated long term goal is self improving AI for chip design, where engineering systems accumulate experience and take on harder problems as they go. The workflows it targets are the ones that determine whether products in the $800 billion plus semiconductor industry ship on schedule and hit their functional and performance targets.
Two things separate it from other agentic EDA efforts, at least by the company’s account. The first is that it ships an open platform customers build on rather than a fixed set of vendor controlled agents, so engineering teams can assemble and own an agentic workforce shaped to their own processes across commercial EDA tools, internal tools and infrastructure. The second is a design intelligence layer that keeps learning from customer data, usage patterns and evaluation signals, supported by agent native tooling and custom models that push past what general purpose agents manage in this domain.
The money goes toward recruiting, agent native tooling and wider customer engagements across verification and physical design.
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