semiconductor
(39)
Applicantz and the art of making engineering happen
AI has acquired a taste for engineering talent. Applicantz, a Houston company founded in 2001, is selling the people, coordination, and accountability that turn a technical ambition into working capacity.
Softweb Solutions and the price of starting over
A semiconductor team kept rebuilding what it already knew. Softweb’s answer reveals a useful truth about enterprise AI: the expensive part often happens before the clever part.
The Chip Bug Nobody Wanted to Read
ChipAgents sells autonomy in the least forgiving corner of computing. Its clearest proof begins with a humbler assignment: read the datasheet, build the testbench, and find the bug before it becomes silicon.
Advanced Engineering Services
AES is the engineering firm behind the engineering firm - simulating heat, stress and flow, then building the automation that makes a design work on the factory floor.
Aerogen Systems
Aerogen Systems is an Ann Arbor deep-tech startup building point-of-use contamination control for semiconductor fabs. Its modules sit inside wafer storage and process tools, continuously capturing and chemically destroying airborne acids and organic contaminants before they reach the wafer - clawing back yield lost to queue-time contamination that conventional cleanroom AMC systems miss. The company spun out of University of Michigan aerospace research and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
Silimate
Silimate is a Mountain View startup building an AI copilot for chip designers. Its AI-native tools find and fix functional bugs and power, performance and area (PPA) issues in digital chip designs, aiming to make hardware development move closer to the speed of software. Founded in 2023 by Ann Wu and Akash Levy, Silimate was the first EDA company Y Combinator backed (S23) and runs on-premise for Fortune 500 enterprises and chip unicorns building GPUs, CPUs and AI accelerators.
Galatek
Galatek is a Singapore-based automation and AI company building intelligent infrastructure for two sectors where precision and data integrity matter most: life sciences and advanced semiconductor manufacturing. It pairs robotics and machine vision with software - its Abio platform unifying ELN, LIMS, SDMS and lab automation, and its InteVega AI vision platform - to run smart labs and inspect chips. Led by CEO David Tian, Galatek raised roughly US$30 million in a Series A round announced in December 2025 to expand across Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.
Morse Micro
Morse Micro is a fabless semiconductor company based in Sydney, Australia, that designs Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah) chips for the Internet of Things. Its sub-1 GHz system-on-chips deliver roughly ten times the range of conventional Wi-Fi at a fraction of the power, letting a single access point connect thousands of sensors, cameras and devices across homes, factories, farms and cities. Founded in 2016 by Wi-Fi chip designers Michael De Nil and Andrew Terry, the company has raised more than US$190 million and ships its award-winning MM6108 and second-generation MM8108 silicon to customers worldwide.
SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
Syenta
Syenta is an Australian deep-tech semiconductor company building next-generation chip-to-chip interconnects for the AI era. Spun out of the Australian National University, it has developed a proprietary process called Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) that deposits and patterns metal in a single step, producing micron-scale interconnects across large packages with fewer process steps. The technology targets the 'memory wall' that limits AI and high-performance computing, aiming to raise interconnect density and bandwidth while cutting manufacturing cost and waste. Headquartered in Sydney with a new development facility in Tempe, Arizona, Syenta has raised more than A$37 million, with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining its board.
Neurophos
Neurophos is an Austin-based photonics startup building an Optical Processing Unit (OPU) that uses light instead of electrons to run AI inference. Spun out of Duke University and the Metacept incubator, the company packs more than a million micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators - roughly 10,000x smaller than conventional photonic elements - onto a single chip to perform the matrix-vector multiplication at the heart of large AI models. It positions the OPU as an energy-efficient, drop-in alternative to GPUs for data-center inference, and raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier in January 2026.
Synopsys, Inc.
Synopsys is an American electronic design automation (EDA) company that builds the software, IP, and simulation tools chipmakers use to design, verify, and manufacture advanced semiconductors. Founded in 1986 around logic-synthesis technology, it is one of three companies that dominate the EDA market and, following its $35 billion acquisition of Ansys in July 2025, has expanded from chip design automation into full silicon-to-systems engineering across electronics, structures, fluids, and optics.
CyberSwarm Inc.
CyberSwarm is a neuromorphic engineering company building brain-inspired, memristor-based hardware that lets machines learn and adapt locally, at the edge, without the cloud. Founded in 2017 by Mihai Raneti and headquartered in San Mateo, California with R&D roots in Ploiesti, Romania, the company is developing a neuromorphic System-on-a-Chip for cybersecurity and energy-efficient AI, positioning its architecture as a new computational layer between conventional digital systems and quantum computing. In May 2026 it raised a $50 million Series A to scale toward commercial deployment across automotive, aerospace, defense, healthcare and robotics.
Enfabrica
Enfabrica is a Silicon Valley chip startup building the networking and memory plumbing that lets tens of thousands of GPUs behave like one giant computer. Its Accelerated Compute Fabric SuperNIC (ACF-S) moves data at 3.2 terabits per second, and its EMFASYS memory fabric lets AI clusters borrow cheap DDR5 DRAM over Ethernet instead of buying more GPUs for capacity. Founded in 2019 by ex-Broadcom and Google networking engineers, the company raised roughly $290M before Nvidia paid over $900M in September 2025 to license its technology and hire CEO Rochan Sankar and much of his team.
eTopus Technology
eTopus Technology is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company that designs ultra-high-speed, ADC/DSP-based SerDes and die-to-die interconnect IP for data centers, high-performance computing, AI, 5G and storage. Founded in 2012 by Harry Chan and Peter Kou, the company licenses silicon-proven PHY IP - spanning 112G on advanced 6/7nm nodes down to 22nm - plus chiplet interfaces supporting UCIe, Bunch of Wires, PCIe Gen 5/6 and CXL. eTopus positions itself on low latency and low power, and has built collaborative chiplet platforms with partners including QuickLogic, OpenFive and CoMira.
Fabric Cryptography
Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.
Frore Systems
Frore Systems is a Silicon Valley thermal-technology company that builds AirJet, the world's first solid-state active cooling chip, and LiquidJet, a direct-liquid coldplate for AI data centers. Founded in 2018 by two former Qualcomm engineers, Frore uses ultrasonic membranes to move air at over 100 mph with no visible moving parts, letting thin fanless devices and dense AI servers run cooler, quieter, and faster. In March 2026 it raised a $143M Series D at a $1.64B valuation, positioning its 'Thermal Stack' as foundational infrastructure for the AI era.
Point2 Technology
Point2 Technology is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company building ultra-low-power, low-latency interconnect chips and cables for AI/ML data centers. Its e-Tube platform sends data as radio-frequency signals through plastic waveguides - a third path between copper and optics - and its smart-retimer SoCs power 800G and 1.6T active electrical cables. Founded in 2016 by a KAIST professor and veterans of Marvell, Finisar and Samsung, the company has drawn investment from NVIDIA's NVentures, Bosch Ventures, Molex and UMC.
SecEdge
SecEdge is a Seattle-based digital security company that secures IoT and Edge devices from the silicon up to the cloud. Formed in 2023 by carving Privafy's IoT business out and acquiring embedded-security pioneer Sequitur Labs, the company packages hard problems - device identity, secure boot, key management, over-the-air updates and secure connectivity - into software products like the EmSPARK Security Suite, the EmPOWER lifecycle-management SaaS and SEC-TPM, a firmware TPM built in Arm TrustZone. Led by semiconductor and digital-security veteran Sami Nassar and chairman Rick Clemmer, SecEdge aims to make chip-to-cloud security something device makers can adopt off the shelf rather than build from scratch.
xMEMS
xMEMS is a Santa Clara semiconductor company that builds sound and cooling out of silicon. Its piezoMEMS platform produces the world's first solid-state MEMS loudspeakers - all-silicon drivers with no moving voice coils - for earbuds, hearing aids, AI glasses and headphones, and the first 'fan-on-a-chip' active micro-cooling device that moves air inside phones, wearables and AI data-center optics. Founded in 2018, the company holds more than 300 patents and has raised roughly $129M across four rounds.
Applied Brain Research
Applied Brain Research (ABR) is a Waterloo, Ontario AI hardware company spun out of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. It builds brain-inspired chips and software that run real-time AI - full-vocabulary speech recognition, text-to-speech and sensor processing - directly on edge devices at power levels measured in milliwatts. Its patented state-space models and the Legendre Memory Unit power the TSP1 Time Series Processor, which ABR calls the world's first single-chip solution for full-vocabulary speech recognition, doing the work of cloud voice AI while consuming 10 to 100 times less power.
Cambridge Terahertz
Cambridge Terahertz is an MIT spinout building a chip-based imaging system that combines the 3D vision of lidar with the see-through power of X-ray, but using human-safe terahertz waves at a thousandth the power of a cell phone. Shrunk from an airport-scale scanner into a palm-sized, two-pound device, its AI-powered sensors detect concealed weapons through clothing and bags, and can see inside sealed packages without opening them. Founded in 2023 by MIT PhD Nathan Monroe, the company raised a $12M seed round led by Felicis with participation from Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund.
Grovf
Grovf is a deep-tech semiconductor startup building AI infrastructure backend networking - RDMA and chiplet IP, soft IP cores, and scale-out NICs that connect AI accelerator servers at 400/800Gbps with sub-2-microsecond latency. Founded in 2017 in Armenia by Artavazd Khachatryan and Khachik Sahakyan, the company began with FPGA-accelerated databases for the Industrial IoT and evolved into networking fabric for large-scale AI model training. Grovf was the first company from Armenia and the Caucasus to win an EU Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant, and went through UC Berkeley's SkyDeck accelerator.
Sonera
Sonera (Sonera Magnetics) is a Berkeley, California deep-tech company building chip-scale magnetic field sensors that read the body's own biomagnetic signals without touching the skin. Its flagship S1 chip performs magnetic muscle sensing (magnetomyography) at room temperature and in wearable form factors, aiming to make neural and neuromuscular data as easy to capture as a heart rate. Applications range from silent-speech interfaces in earbuds and glasses to gesture control for XR, plus clinical uses like portable brain imaging and neurodegenerative biomarker tracking. Spun out of UC Berkeley research and backed by an $11M seed round, Sonera is turning a lab-grade magnetics breakthrough into a scalable sensing platform.
Aitomatic
Aitomatic builds autonomous AI agents that capture and operationalize the hard-won knowledge of veteran industrial experts - the kind of know-how that quietly walks out the door when senior engineers retire. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google and ex-Panasonic veterans, the Palo Alto company has open-sourced OpenSSA (Small Specialist Agents) as an inaugural member of the AI Alliance with IBM and Meta, and released SemiKong, the world's first open-source LLM purpose-built for the semiconductor industry.
minds.ai
minds.ai builds AI systems for semiconductor manufacturers. Its Maestro platform - powered by the DeepSim engine - uses reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and generative AI to optimize fab scheduling, planning, forecasting, and control inside 24/7 wafer-fabrication plants. Founded in 2014, the company is based in Santa Cruz, California, with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
PDF Solutions
PDF Solutions is a Santa Clara semiconductor analytics company that turns the firehose of chip-manufacturing and test data into decisions. Its Exensio platform connects fabs, foundries, OSATs and fabless designers, normalizing data across silos so customers can ramp yield faster, catch defects earlier and run AI/ML models on the factory floor. Founded in 1991 and public since 2001 (Nasdaq: PDFS), it serves 130+ semiconductor companies including TSMC, Intel, Qualcomm, Analog Devices and DENSO.
Ricursive Intelligence
Ricursive Intelligence is a Palo Alto frontier AI lab using artificial intelligence to compress the slow, expensive process of semiconductor design. Founded in late 2025 by Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, the co-creators of Google's AlphaChip, the company is building an end-to-end AI model that designs, verifies and closes silicon, aiming to create a recursive loop where AI designs better chips and those chips train better AI. It raised $335M across seed and Series A rounds, reaching a $4B valuation roughly two months after launch.
EnCharge AI
EnCharge AI is a Santa Clara semiconductor startup, spun out of Princeton University, building AI accelerator chips based on analog in-memory computing. Its charge-based architecture runs heavy AI workloads on laptops, workstations and edge devices at roughly 20x the energy efficiency of conventional GPUs. Its first product, the EN100 accelerator, delivers 200+ TOPS within an 8.25W power budget, aiming to move generative AI out of the data center and onto the devices people actually hold.