Chipmind Launches from Stealth with $2.4M Funding to Redefine Chip Design with AI Agents

Zurich-based startup Chipmind has publicly emerged from stealth with a $2.4 million pre-seed round led by Founderful, joined by several prominent angel investors from the semiconductor industry. The funding will support the expansion of Chipmind’s engineering team and the continued development of its flagship product, Chipmind Agents, designed to accelerate the design and verification of microchips through AI-driven collaboration.

Unlike generic AI tools, Chipmind’s approach is rooted in the realities of semiconductor engineering. Its agents are trained not only on each customer’s proprietary design data but also on the intricate hierarchies, workflows, and electronic design automation (EDA) tools that define modern chipmaking. Acting as intelligent collaborators rather than simple assistants, Chipmind Agents are built to cut design cycle times by up to 40 percent—freeing engineers to focus on innovation instead of repetition.

Integrating Intelligence Into Existing Workflows

Navigating the entrenched systems of semiconductor design is no small feat. Legacy toolchains—comprising EDA platforms, verification sequences, and hierarchical design structures—are deeply integrated, rigid, and not easily replaced. Recognizing this, Chipmind’s founders chose a path of augmentation rather than disruption. Their platform layers “design-aware” agents over existing workflows, injecting intelligence into the process without discarding the foundational systems that chipmakers rely on.

Chipmind’s CEO Harald Kröll explains that this philosophy is at the core of the company’s approach.

“Every company’s chip has its own DNA—a proprietary web of constraints, specifications, and custom tools. Our agents don’t just read that context; they understand it.”

By enabling the agent to grasp the full design schema—including specifications, toolchain settings, and RTL infrastructure—Chipmind ensures that automation remains both meaningful and secure. Engineers stay firmly in control of creative decisions, while the AI quietly handles the mechanical workload that slows innovation.

A Founding Story Rooted in Engineering Experience

Kröll co-founded Chipmind with Sandro Belfanti, whom he met during their PhD studies at ETH Zurich. Both have spent their careers in chip design, collectively contributing to more than twenty successful chips, from mobile-phone modems to complex system-on-chip (SoC) architectures.

Belfanti reflects on the frustration that led to Chipmind’s creation:

“Chip development often feels like an exercise in precision over creativity. I wanted a way to automate the mechanical parts so engineers could focus on innovation. Chipmind Agents finally make that possible.”

Having lived the realities of chip engineering, the founders understand the inefficiencies and bottlenecks firsthand. Their shared vision is to empower engineers by removing repetitive, low-value work and giving them back the time and freedom to pursue true design breakthroughs.

Where Chipmind Fits in the Broader Ecosystem

By operating in Europe—still relatively underrepresented in this niche compared to Silicon Valley—Chipmind occupies a distinctive position. The company draws on the region’s deep research foundations, particularly ETH Zurich’s legacy in semiconductor innovation, and on the growing ecosystem of open-source EDA initiatives. This combination of academic excellence and collaborative tooling enables Chipmind to serve global chip designers who face mounting pressure to shorten development cycles, cut costs, and manage ever-increasing design complexity.

Chipmind also highlights the importance of confidentiality and customisation: the company emphasises that its agents are trained locally on each customer’s data and tool flows, ensuring that proprietary design knowledge remains secure. The agents adapt to the customer’s environment—rather than forcing the engineer to adapt to the tool. This is a significant value proposition in a domain where intellectual property and process integrity are paramount.

Implications for the Future of Chip Design

The launch of Chipmind arrives at a moment when the semiconductor industry is stepping into a new era. Chips are no longer simply faster—now they must be smarter, more specialised, energy-efficient and tailored for domains such as AI, edge computing, autonomous systems and quantum computing.

What Chipmind—and companies like it—are trying to enable is a shift from purely human-driven design workflows to human + AI collaborative workflows where agents handle the routine, error-prone tasks and engineers focus on architecture, innovation, system trade-offs. Shorter development cycles mean faster iteration, which in turn means quicker innovation and faster arrival of next-gen technologies.

In the medium to long term, this agentic approach could change how design teams are structured, how tools are built and how value is created. Smaller firms might tackle complex design projects because the automation reduces the resource barrier. Design cycles might shrink significantly, meaning custom chips tailored to niche applications become viable rather than only for mega-projects. With AI agents embedded into design flows, we may see chips emerging not just from semiconductor giants but from more agile teams worldwide.

Ultimately, Chipmind’s emergence marks more than the debut of a startup—it signals a shift in how the world’s chips will be conceived and built. By embedding “design-aware” AI agents directly into existing workflows, the company is laying the groundwork for a new era of semiconductor engineering, where automation handles the repetitive groundwork and human creativity drives innovation. The result is a future defined by faster, smarter, and more efficient chip development—one where the boundary between human expertise and AI collaboration continues to blur, transforming hardware design into a truly symbiotic process.