Chip design today faces a challenge: development cycles are long and filled with repetitive, low-level engineering tasks that slow innovation. Meet Chipmind, a Swiss startup founded in 2023 by Harald Kröll and Sandro Belfanti, former PhD colleagues from ETH Zurich with expertise in AI and chip design gained from developing over 20 chips ranging from mobile phone modems to system-on-chip solutions.
Kröll and Belfanti’s vision was born from extensive experience working with legacy chip design flows that struggle to integrate modern AI due to data sensitivity and customisation requirements.
Emerging from stealth with $2.4 million in funding led by Founderful, with participation from prominent angel investors in the semiconductor industry, Chipmind is launching Chipmind Agents: a new class of AI agents engineered to tackle the most complex chip design and verification tasks autonomously.
Chipmind Agents function like intelligent co-workers, deeply understanding the entire chip context and autonomously executing complex, multi-step tasks while keeping engineers fully in control. By automating these low-level processes, Chipmind promises to save engineers up to 40% of their time, dramatically accelerating the path from design specification to chip manufacturing.
This “design-aware” approach transforms legacy systems into AI-ready workflows without disrupting existing processes, an advantage that sets Chipmind apart from other players in the AI chip design space such as Cadence, Synopsys, and some new AI-driven startups.
Kröll added, “Chipmind Agents solve tedious, low-level routine tasks that typically consume a significant portion of engineers’ time. The platform includes a chat window, a terminal, and a file browser to navigate designs.
These agents are trained selectively on-premises or in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using a customer’s in-house chip designs, ensuring compliance with confidentiality policies. For demonstration purposes, agents are pre-trained on the five largest open-source chip designs.”
Looking ahead, Chipmind plans to use the recent funding to expand its engineering team and strengthen collaborations with key semiconductor industry players globally.
Edouard Treccani, principal at Founderful, added: “In a world buzzing with AI every day, Chipmind stands out as a refreshingly real solution to a problem Harald and Sandro have spent 20 years deep in. From day one, they’ve built in close dialogue with the market, and the early feedback has been remarkably positive.”