Welcome to CognichipA frontier AI lab building Artificial Chip Intelligence ACI™
We started out in mid-2024 with a team of deep semiconductor and AI experts from Apple, Intel, Cisco, KLA, Aquantia, and Synopsys. Our team includes chip veterans with 100s of tapeouts under their belt, and AI scientists with 4 World Olympiad medals, 9 Google Scholars, and over 40,000 citations.
We are backed by a group of amazing investors with deep semiconductor roots—including Lip-Bu Tan, the visionary venture capitalist and technology executive.
Our mission: To create Artificial Chip Intelligence ACI™ — a type of AI that learns, understands, and solves design problems at designer-level cognitive abilities.
A scaling crisis in chip designToday’s semiconductor economic wall
Why do we need ACI? The world is facing a critical bottleneck in hardware development. While AI software innovation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, the essential silicon that runs it still takes 3-5 years from concept to production.
Empowering humanity to build the future of silicon
High barrier to entry
$40M to $100M per advanced-node tape-out
Product-fit risk
3 to 5-plus years from idea to market
Stalled flywheels
95% spent on tasks—we have been rationing innovation
Global race
for AI and semiconductor sovereignty
A new era of semiconductor engineering starts now
Cognichip’s ACI delivers silicon-ready results in days—not months—fundamentally transforming how the world builds chips.
The Model is the Design
ACI is not new tooling; it’s a fundamental rethink of semiconductor development. We believe in a modern, conversation-based approach, with physics-informed foundation models and abundant compute at the core.
Built for Enterprise Integrity
Global innovation demands uncompromised IP protection. We believe advanced AI systems must uphold absolute data sovereignty, security, and enterprise trust. Your company’s ‘alpha’ will never enter ACI’s training pipelines.
Democratizing Access
The next wave of breakthroughs—in robotics, biomedical devices, or clean energy—hinges on custom chips. We believe that every team can become a silicon powerhouse. ACI unlocks expertise silos and democratizes chip design.
Scaling Engineering Intuition
We believe that AI doesn’t replace engineers; it amplifies their architectural genius. ACI scales the impact of each and every engineering role across the chip lifecycle.
“Cognichip’s ACI represents one of the most comprehensive approaches to bringing AI into the contemporary design environment—it simply ‘speaks chip.’”
— Manoher Bommena, Vice President of Engineering at Renesas
A veteran team of semiconductor & AI pioneers
Combining decades of executive semiconductor leadership with breakthrough AI research to reshape how chips are made.
Leadership Team
Faraj Aalaei
Founder
2X Tech Founder/CEO
Ehsan Kamalinejad
Co-founder
Chief Technology Officer
Simon Sabato
Co-founder
Chief Architect
Stelios Diamantidis
Founding
Chief Product Officer
Mehdi Daneshpanah
Founding
SVP of Engineering
Members of the Board
Umesh Padval
Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures
Lip-Bu Tan
CEO, Intel
Shahin Farshchi
Partner, Lux Capital
Science & business advisors
Amin Saberi
Science Advisor
Peyman Esfahani
Science Advisor
Ant van Rensburg
Business Advisor
Hassan Parsa
Business Advisor
Michael Sanie
Business Advisor
Join our team
We are semiconductor professionals and scientists in mathematics, physics, and computer science — uniting these disciplines with design-forward tools. Join our team to work among the interdisciplinary efforts driving meaningful innovation.