Agentrys Raises $24.5 Million to Build Agentic Design Automation for Chipmakers

Platform from Mark Ren, who pioneered AI for chip design at NVIDIA, enables engineering teams to build and own a self-improving agentic workforce for chip design.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Agentrys, a startup focused on automating and continuously improving chip design, today announced that it has raised $24.5 million in funding. The total comprises an oversubscribed $19.1 million seed round led by Etna Labs, following a $5.4 million pre-seed led by MediaTek, the company’s first strategic backer. The new funding will go toward recruiting, agent-native tooling, and expanding customer engagements across verification and physical design.

Chip design has never been more economically important, yet much of the work still depends on scarce experts and thousands of manual engineering hours per chip. Founded by Mark Ren, who brings nearly three decades of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and AI R&D experience spanning NVIDIA Research and IBM Research—including leading ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model for chip design —Agentrys was built to close that gap, enabling engineering teams to embed an agentic workforce for chip design directly inside their own workflows.

Agentrys is defining a new category—Agentic Design Automation (ADA)—that evolves chip-design automation from traditional EDA tools focused on individual tasks to intelligent systems that automate, learn from, and continuously improve entire engineering workflows. The company’s long-term vision is to advance self-improving AI for chip design, enabling engineering systems to learn from experience, evolve their capabilities, and tackle increasingly complex design challenges. In leveraging ADA, Agentrys targets the workflows that determine whether chips in the $800+ billion and rapidly growing semiconductor industry ship on time and meet their functional and performance targets.

Agentrys distinguishes itself from other agentic EDA solutions on two fronts. First, it is an open platform customers build on, rather than a fixed set of vendor-controlled agents, enabling them to build and own an agentic engineering workforce tailored to their workflows and spanning commercial EDA tools, internal tools, and infrastructure. Second, its design intelligence layer continuously learns from customer data, usage, and evaluation signals, while agent-native tools and custom models extend what general-purpose AI agents can accomplish in chip design.

"Building production-grade agents that reliably automate real engineering work is far from easy — that's the problem Agentrys exists to solve," said Mark Ren, Founder and CEO of Agentrys. "We help engineering teams turn manual workflows into an agentic workforce that designs chips faster, delivers better results, and systematically improve in capability over time. That's the difference between renting capability everyone else can rent and building an asset that compounds for you alone."

"Chip design is one of the first high-value domains where recursive self-improvement (RSI) can become practical because results can be objectively evaluated with rigorous engineering tools and metrics," said members of Etna Labs’ investment team. "Agentrys is building a self-improving agent layer across the EDA stack. Mark led some of the defining AI-for-chip-design work of the past decade, and Agentrys is turning that experience into agents that improve with every design." Etna Labs, a research-driven investment firm, has backed more than 20 AI companies with a particular focus on foundation models and the labs applying them to science, robotics, and other frontier domains.

"We believe semiconductor R&D has its own unique domain specificity in agentic AI development,” said Brian Hsu, Managing Director of MediaTek Innovation Fund. "Agentrys envisions a builder solution that enables semiconductor engineering teams to customize and improve AI agents for chipset design workflows. This could help capture and reuse domain knowledge, hence scale agent development suitable for semiconductor R&D systematically."

Agentrys has already demonstrated its platform end to end, running an autonomous multi-agent workflow that took a 32-bit CPU from specification to sign-off-clean GDS layout with no human in the loop. On NVIDIA’s public CVDP verification benchmark, Agentrys is among the first to exceed 90% accuracy, with its agent evolution techniques systematically improving performance over successive iterations. Agentrys has partnered with several of the world’s top fabless semiconductor companies, a leading global foundry, and several leading chip startups. The company is engaging customers today across full digital and analog design flows, with system design on the roadmap.

“Every workflow execution generates engineering observations. Every observation is evaluated. Every evaluation improves the system,” added Ren. "Our vision is an engineering workforce that continuously learns and improves—and with this funding, we’re extending that capability across the full design flow and putting it in the hands of more teams.”

About Agentrys

Agentrys is an applied research and engineering team building the future of chip design and defining a new category: Agentic Design Automation (ADA). Agentrys is building the platform for ADA, enabling semiconductor design teams to build, own, and continuously improve their own agentic engineering workforce. Its technology brings together design intelligence, agent-native tools, and custom models to automate and improve real chip-design workflows across the existing EDA ecosystem. Agentrys includes researchers and engineers from NVIDIA, Meta, AMD, Samsung, Google, Siemens, and other leading technology companies, with deep experience in AI for chip design, EDA, LLM systems, and silicon infrastructure. The team has helped create pioneering systems across AI for chip design, GPU-accelerated EDA, and industry benchmarks—including ChipNeMo, NVCell, DREAMPlace, VerilogEval, and CVDP—alongside production-grade EDA tools and design infrastructure. The company is headquartered in San Jose, with offices in Austin and Taiwan.

To learn more, visit https://agentrys.ai/.