Startup aims to cut the time and cost of developing custom semiconductors through artificial intelligence.
Silicon Valley startup Architect Labs has secured $24 million in seed funding as it seeks to transform semiconductor design through artificial intelligence, the company announced on Thursday.
The Palo Alto-based firm is developing AI tools aimed at simplifying and accelerating the creation of custom chips, a process that currently requires significant engineering resources, lengthy development cycles, and substantial research and development spending.
Custom chip design has become a major growth area in the semiconductor industry, with companies such as Broadcom and Marvell helping cloud providers including Amazon and Google build specialized processors tailored for artificial intelligence and data center workloads. These chips have emerged as a key alternative to products offered by Nvidia.
Architect Labs believes AI can reduce both the time and cost associated with chip development. According to co-founder Ebrahim Hussain, the company plans to support traditional semiconductor firms while also enabling software companies to design chips optimized for their own applications.
Hussain said many organizations today struggle not with the physical implementation of chips but with determining the most effective architecture for specific workloads such as AI, robotics, and other compute-intensive applications. Architect Labs aims to address this challenge by using AI to assist in the architectural design process.
Founded by Hussain and Aaditya Subedi, the startup employs about 18 people, with expertise spanning machine learning and semiconductor engineering.
Subedi said the company’s long-term vision is to make chip design significantly more accessible, similar to how Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) helped democratize chip manufacturing.
The funding round was led by Kindred Ventures and also attracted participation from TQ Ventures, Race Capital, and Together Fund. The investor group includes prominent technology leaders such as Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, as well as executives from OpenAI and Nvidia.
