Meet the founder and CEO of ChipAgents: William Wang

For years, chip design and verification have remained among the most complex and resource-intensive challenges in engineering. Hardware teams spend months navigating fragmented electronic design automation (EDA) toolchains, long simulation runtimes, and manual verification workflows that stretch development cycles and inflate costs. Designing at the Register Transfer Level (RTL) — where logic is described in languages like Verilog or VHDL — demands both software-like precision and deep hardware intuition. Each change must be validated across thousands of simulation cases, with engineers writing extensive test benches and debugging waveform outputs line by line. Design and verification can consume anywhere from 60-80% of total chip development time, yet these painstaking efforts are indispensable, forming the foundation for everything from AI accelerators and data-center processors to automotive controllers. 

ChipAgents marks a breakthrough in this long-standing bottleneck. The company’s agentic AI platform reimagines how chips are designed, debugged, and verified — enabling faster design cycles, automated verification, and seamless collaboration between human engineers and AI. Built to feel native within the environments and tools engineers already rely on, ChipAgents fits seamlessly into existing design flows while introducing new levels of intelligence and automation. By transforming how teams generate RTL code, debug complex systems, and validate designs, ChipAgents is unlocking a new era of speed, quality, and creativity in hardware engineering. Early customers report that tasks which once required weeks of manual effort can now be completed in days without compromising correctness or performance.

This is why Bessemer’s Lance Co Ting Keh, Jason Scheller, and David Cowan are excited to lead ChipAgents’ $21 million Series A. With oversight from industry veterans like Wally Rhines, Raúl Camposano, and Jack Harding, the company’s vision goes beyond innovation. To learn more, we sat down with founder and CEO William Wang for his thoughts about how ChipAgents is defining the future of EDA.

Q&A with the founder of ChipAgents

Tell us about yourself. 

Before starting ChipAgents.ai, I spent most of my career in academia and currently serve as the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Design at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the past nine years at UCSB, I’ve built the Natural Language Processing research group into a leading center for AI innovation, collaborating with nearly all major technology companies to advance fundamental algorithms in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

What inspired you to start ChipAgents?

My journey toward founding ChipAgents started long before the deep learning revolution. Back in 2011, during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, we were experimenting with recurrent neural network language models, well before the deep learning era and even before ImageNet transformed the field.

My doctoral research at CMU focused on theorem proving and formal methods. We developed an approximate personalized PageRank algorithm that made inference for theorem proving locally groundable, meaning that inference time became independent of the size of the underlying database. That early work on scalable, interpretable reasoning planted the seeds for what would eventually become ChipAgents’ mission in verification.

At UCSB, my group continued pushing the boundaries of reasoning and learning. We created DeepPat, the industry’s first deep reinforcement learning framework for reasoning models in 2017, which demonstrated how neural networks can learn to reason through complex knowledge graphs. By 2024, it became clear that these technologies had matured to a point where they could fundamentally transform how we design and optimize chips. That belief, combining decades of AI research with the opportunity to reinvent EDA, was what inspired me to start ChipAgents.

What exactly does ChipAgents do?

At ChipAgents, we’re building intelligent AI agents that transform how chips are designed and verified. Our mission is to bring the power of agentic AI into the core of the EDA process, making chip design faster, more reliable, and far more scalable. Traditionally, verification — ensuring that a chip design behaves exactly as intended — has been one of the most complex, time-consuming, and expensive stages of semiconductor development. Modern chips can contain billions of transistors, and verifying every interaction has required massive engineering effort. At ChipAgents, we’re using AI reasoning agents that can analyze, understand, and even prove design properties automatically, dramatically reducing verification bottlenecks.

Our technology allows these agents to read design specifications, reason about logical correctness, and generate verification artifacts or proofs, using the same class of language and reasoning models that have revolutionized natural language understanding. This creates a new level of automation, one that goes beyond pattern matching or simulation, toward true semantic understanding of hardware behavior.

ChipAgents builds on more than a decade of AI research. From my early work at Carnegie Mellon on theorem proving and locally groundable inference, to our development of deep reinforcement learning reasoning models, we’ve been exploring how AI can perform structured, explainable reasoning. Now, that foundation enables us to apply these methods to one of the most critical challenges in modern computing: making chip verification intelligent, adaptive, and orders of magnitude more efficient.

Tell us about the momentum you’re seeing at ChipAgents. 

We’re seeing incredible momentum — sales are up more than 50x year-over-year in ARR, and usage has grown over 60x. It’s a super exciting time to witness how AI is transforming chip design and verification at a fundamental level. We’re still at the early stages of this revolution, but the acceleration we’re seeing from customers and partners makes it clear that intelligent agents are redefining what’s possible in the semiconductor industry.

How might chip companies redefine their competitive advantage when the barrier isn’t hardware capability but AI workflow mastery?

I believe the entire workflow of chip design and verification will change in the era of agentic AI. In the past, engineers spent enormous time implementing specifications, writing test plans, and generating test stimuli by hand. But as AI becomes a core part of the workflow, competitive advantage will shift from manual implementation to how effectively teams can orchestrate AI agents — how they write better prompts, configure intelligent workflows, and verify AI-generated collateral with confidence. In other words, success won’t just depend on who has the most powerful chips, but on who can best collaborate with AI to accelerate innovation, ensure correctness, and continuously optimize the design cycle.

What is your vision for the future of ChipAgents?

Our vision is to go beyond point tools in EDA and create a truly end-to-end agentic AI design and verification system, from RTL to GDS. We want to build an integrated workflow where AI agents can understand design intent, reason across abstraction levels, and continuously improve through feedback.

Ultimately, we aim to close the loop between pre-silicon and post-silicon, using real-world performance and validation data to inform the next generation of design. This creates a virtuous cycle of agentic AI, where the system not only automates design and verification but also learns and optimizes itself over time. That’s how we see the future of chip design: intelligent, adaptive, and self-improving.

What is a common misconception about the future of AI? Or something that people are not thinking about, but should be?

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it’s here to replace engineers. In reality, AI will transform the nature of engineering work, not eliminate it. There’s often a psychological barrier when people imagine AI “taking over” their roles, but at ChipAgents, our mission is the opposite: to enable engineers to 10x (even 100x productivity in the future), not replace them. We’re giving engineers the tools to shift from implementation to innovation, to spend less time on tedious, repetitive tasks and more time designing new architectures, exploring new ideas, and creating better chips. The future of AI in chip design isn’t about automation for its own sake; it’s about augmenting human creativity and enabling engineers to operate at an entirely new level of abstraction and productivity.