Seligman Ventures Leads Cognichip’s $60M Series A to Back Physics-Informed AI for Chip Design, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Seligman Ventures’ Umesh Padval Join the Board

• Total Funding Exceeds $93M as Semiconductor Leaders Rally Around Cognichip’s Full-Stack ACI® – Artificial Chip Intelligence Technology
• Seligman Ventures and Japan-based SBI Investment Join Coalition of Industry Leaders to Re-Architect Chip Design for the AI Era
• Lip-Bu Tan, the Visionary Venture Capitalist and Technology Executive who Pioneered the Modern Semiconductor Ecosystem, Points to Cognichip’s Physics-Informed AI as the Industry’s New Blueprint

Redwood City, CA — April 1, 2026 —  Cognichip, the company pioneering ACI® – Artificial Chip Intelligence – for semiconductor design, today 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, bringing 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, has joined Cognichip’s Board of Directors. Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, who also participated in the round, joins Cognichip’s Board of Directors.

The oversubscribed investment into Cognichip as the pioneering leader in this transition to AI-enabled chip design reflects growing recognition across the semiconductor ecosystem that incremental improvements are no longer sufficient. As chip complexity increases across digital, analog, mixed-signal, and advanced-node designs, the infrastructure required to design and manufacture semiconductors must evolve just as fundamentally.

Semiconductor Veterans Back Cognichip’s Approach

Lip-Bu Tan, the visionary venture capitalist and technology executive who pioneered the modern semiconductor ecosystem, brings unparalleled leadership experience to Cognichip’s Board of Directors. As former CEO of Cadence Design Systems, he led the company’s transformation into a global leader in computational engineering software. As CEO of Intel, Tan operates at the intersection of global semiconductor manufacturing, design infrastructure, and transformative AI.

The appointment marks a high-profile reunion between Tan and Cognichip Founder & CEO Faraj Aalaei. The duo previously collaborated over the last three decades at Aquantia and Centillium Communications, where Tan served on the board under Aalaei’s leadership, a partnership that culminated in two successful IPOs. By joining Cognichip, Tan reunites with a proven chief executive to once again disrupt a mature industry with a transformative, AI-first architectural blueprint.

“The semiconductor industry is at a critical juncture; an AI framework for innovation and efficiency will unlock massive global opportunity,” said Lip-BuTan. “Success in this space requires a rare fusion of deep domain expertise combined with advanced AI research and an end-to-end integrated design approach. Cognichip’s groundbreaking, physics-informed foundation model technology and proven leadership team position it to become a generational company.”

Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and veteran semiconductor company CEO, was a board member of leading deep-tech companies, including Integrated Device Technology (acquired by Renesas Electronics), Mellanox Technologies (acquired by NVIDIA), Monolithic Power Systems, and P.A. Semi (acquired by Apple). He emphasized the importance of execution and domain depth.

“Semiconductor design cycles have steadily lengthened over the past several decades, creating a major productivity bottleneck for the industry,” said Umesh Padval. “The next wave of progress to significantly reduce the chip design cycles will not come from incremental optimization of existing design tools, but from using AI to parallelize what has historically been a highly serial chip design process. Cognichip is building the foundation for that shift through physics-informed models, curated datasets, and production-ready integration with the semiconductor design stack. Faraj is a third-time founder who has assembled a uniquely complementary team spanning leading-edge AI, chip design, and system architecture, and we’re excited to partner with them as they redefine how chips are designed in the AI era.”

Expanding this coalition of semiconductor and infrastructure investors, Japan-based SBI Investment brings a global perspective on the future of compute and AI hardware. With a growing portfolio across next-generation semiconductor and AI companies, SBI’s investment reflects a shared conviction that advancing AI will require fundamentally rethinking how chips are designed, built, and deployed.

“Cognichip's ACI® serves as the essential intelligence layer for the next-generation AI semiconductors. It is expected to reduce design costs by as much as 75% and cut timelines by 50%,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, Chairman, President & CEO of SBI Holdings. “SBI's investment in Cognichip aligns with its existing investments in Preferred Networks, Tenstorrent, Majestic Labs, and EdgeCortix. We are firmly convinced that Cognichip's ACI® innovation will fundamentally transform the economics of the semiconductor industry."

Beyond Wrappers: Two Years of Deep Model and Dataset Investment

Over the past two years, Cognichip has built a team of experienced chip architects paired with frontier AI scientists, including World Olympiad medalists in mathematics and physics. This domain integration reflects the technical depth required to build AI for semiconductor design. As a result, Cognichip has created one of the industry's deepest datasets under governance, based on complex design, verification, and manufacturing constraints.

“If you want to unlock meaningful efficiency gains in chip design, you have to do the hard work,” said Faraj Aalaei, Founder and CEO of Cognichip. “Maximum gains only come from integrating models, datasets, and infrastructure into a unified system. If you’re not doing that hard lifting, you’re leaving a lot of chips on the table.”

Unlike agentic approaches that rely on thin wrappers built around general-purpose LLMs, Cognichip’s deep technology investments make ACI® the industry’s only full-stack AI-enabled design solution, bringing together high end-to-end cognitive intensity, unified planning and orchestration, unlimited context management, predictable operational efficiency, and secure deployment into chip design environments.

Re-Architecting Chip Design for the AI Era

AI systems are advancing daily. Yet, the chips that power them still take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to design. This creates a circular constraint, where scaling AI is ultimately limited by the hardware that powers it, yet that hardware can’t evolve fast enough to keep pace. To unlock AI's full potential, Cognichip is fundamentally reshaping how chips are designed and built.

Founded in 2024 by semiconductor and AI veterans, Cognichip introduced ACI® – Artificial Chip Intelligence, a type of AI that understands, learns, and solves chip design problems with designer-level cognitive abilities. Built on a purpose-built, physics-informed foundation model, ACI® fuses logic and physics-based reasoning to navigate complex design spaces and transforms traditional serial workflows into concurrent, adaptive, and highly automated design processes. This enables all engineers to operate as architects while ACI® supports technical execution, reducing development time, cost, and complexity.

The result: Cognichip accelerates design cycles from many months to just days and reduces costs by 75% while optimizing power, performance, and area– making customer silicon faster, cheaper, and more accessible.

Entering the Next Phase of Enterprise Deployment

With $93 million in total funding and strong backing from semiconductor industry leaders, Cognichip is deepening high-quality enterprise engagements across the global semiconductor ecosystem. The company is currently engaged with more than 30 semiconductor companies, including many of the top 20 semiconductor leaders, spanning digital, analog, mixed-signal, and foundry environments.

These engagements reflect strong market validation and measurable results across real-world production workflows, where customers are observing significant reductions in design cycles and cost while maintaining rigorous performance and manufacturability standards.

To learn more about Cognichip’s vision for enterprise-ready AI in chip design, visit www.cognichip.ai.

About Cognichip

Cognichip is developing the world’s first Artificial Chip Intelligence (ACI®) to reimagine chip design. Founded by experts from Amazon, Google, Apple, Aquantia, Synopsys, and KLA, the company tackles high cost and inaccessibility in chip development, enabling hardware to evolve as quickly as software innovation.

Backed by $93 million in total funding from Seligman Ventures, SBI Investment, Mayfield, Lux Capital, and Candou Ventures, Cognichip’s ACI® reduces design cycles by 50%, cuts development costs by 75%, and optimizes power, performance, and efficiency. ACI® accelerates innovation and broadens access to semiconductor technology by making it easier, more affordable, and accessible to a broader range of innovators.

Learn more at www.cognichip.ai.

About Seligman Ventures

Seligman Ventures is the venture capital arm of Seligman Investments, focused on backing technology companies from early stage through pre-IPO across AI and cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and modern data-center hardware. Led by Managing Partners Umesh Padval and Ashish Kakran, and CFO and Operating Partner Eddie Ackerman, the firm brings together deep operating, investing, and public-markets expertise to partner with founders building category-defining companies. For more information, please visit seligman.com.