A multi-agent system has carried a 32-bit CPU from specification to sign-off-clean GDS layout without a human in the loop, a result its builder says shows where chip design automation is headed. The startup behind the demo, Agentrys, closed $24.5M in funding to pursue that vision.
Founder Mark Ren, who previously ran Nvidia’s ChipNeMo project and spent years at IBM Research, describes the category as Agentic Design Automation. His company’s platform is open, letting engineering teams assemble their own agents across commercial EDA tools and internal infrastructure.
The capital splits between an oversubscribed $19.1M seed led by Etna Labs and a $5.4M pre-seed from MediaTek, which signed on as the first strategic backer. Ren’s team also points to an autonomous run of Nvidia’s CVDP verification benchmark where accuracy cleared 90% and kept climbing with each iteration.
The new funds go to hiring, agent-native tooling and customer expansion as chipmakers look to stretch scarce design talent. Agentrys argues that every executed workflow generates observations, and that each evaluation makes the system better, which is the loop it plans to scale.
