Santa Barbara AI firm raises $21M in Series A
Santa Barbara’s influence in the AI/Quantum landscape will stay in the headlines at least one more week after ChipAgents, a Goleta-based AI chip design company, announced it has raised $21 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round.
Announced Oct. 22, ChipAgents has raised $24 million since being founded in 2024 by UC Santa Barbara Professor William Wang, who is currently acting as the company’s CEO. ChipAgents Series A round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with strategic backing from Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, and additional top semiconductor companies. Previous investor ScOp Venture Capital, based in Santa Barbara, lent additional support in this round.
Wang, who has been at UCSB since 2016, is considered a world-leading expert on AI. That, combined with his interest in the semiconducting space and how AI could evolve the industry, is what drew his interest to founding ChipAgents.
“We really just see a great potential in accelerating chip design verification with AI. That is why we started the company and we built this team that is really starting to push the boundary,” Wang told the Business Times.
ChipAgent’s goal is to effectively use AI to speed up the process of chip design and verification. This would help engineers of the actual semiconductor chips themselves, as it would make the hardware development faster, more intuitive, and dramatically more productive.
“If you look in any room, there are a lot of chips. Cell phones, laptops, TVs, monitors, all these different items use chips. Chips are everywhere. And the challenge right now is designing chips because all the chips are getting so complicated,” Wang said.
He noted that as chips have become more complex in an effort to make them more powerful, last longer, etc., it has become increasingly more difficult for humans to manually create the design of the chips.
Enter ChipAgents’ electronic design automation AI platform, which automates routine tasks, accelerates design and verification, and enables AI-native workflows.
“We want to use AI to be able to accelerate not just the design, but also the verification component to make sure the chip actually functions exactly as it’s supposed to be,” Wang said.
Wang added that the goal of the company and its AI platform is not to replace jobs — a topic that scares many working-class folks. Rather, the platform would empower engineers to focus on innovation, focusing more on the creative parts of chip design.
“That is the future we are hoping for,” Wang said. “We bring ChipAgents to engineers so they collaborate with AI to enable better productivity, so that they can shorten the time to market and really improve the performance of these chips.”
Despite only being about a year old, ChipAgents has experienced great success. According to the company, its platform has been deployed at 50 leading semiconductor companies, with sales are expected to grow 50 times its revenue in 2024.
The company also saw a 6,377% surge in monthly usage in the first half of 2025, leveraging agentic AI to accelerate RTL code generation, testbench creation, debugging, and verification through intuitive, language-based commands, it said in a press release.
“The entrance barrier is pretty high to be able to win the trust of the semiconductor companies, because these are the people who really take out billions of chips each year, but we see a high demand in using AI to accelerate that process and so we have seen a lot of interest,” Wang said.
As such, ChipAgents is going all in. Though the company is currently based in Goleta, ChipAgents will be opening a new office, which will become its headquarters, in Santa Clara. Wang, who is currently on leave from UCSB, splits his time between the Bay Area and Santa Barbara, so opening an office in Santa Clara is good for that reason and for business with many chip companies up north.
Wang said the Goleta office, which is located inside Goleta’s Tech Park, will still be critical to the company’s success, however, serving as ChipAgent’s research and development headquarters. ChipAgents currently employs about 25 people; it aims to double in size by the end of 2026, adding people in both Santa Clara and Santa Barbara.
“Quoting Jeff Henley, UC Santa Barbara is the best-kept secret in California and it is definitely true. Hiring AI-talented people is very difficult for any startup because you are dealing with big incumbents, but being in this area and teaching for the last nine years, I believe the students are extremely talented. That makes the Santa Barbara area a very unique place and that is the reason we will keep our R&D offices here,” Wang said.
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