Tattvam AI raises $1.7 million to speed up semiconductor chip design

Seedcamp-backed Tattvam AI is building a reasoning-driven AI system to automate complex semiconductor design tasks, aiming to compress multi-year development cycles into weeks

Tattvam AI, a deeptech startup building AI systems to automate semiconductor chip design, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp, with participation from EWOR, Entropy Industrial Ventures, Concept Ventures, and semiconductor angel Stan Boland.

 

The world is racing to build custom silicon. Unlike general-purpose chips designed to handle varied tasks, custom silicon refers to specialised processors built and optimised for specific workloads such as AI training or AI inference. These purpose-built chips can deliver up to 100x performance improvements over general-purpose hardware such as GPUs for their targeted applications, while often consuming significantly less power.

 

Tattvam AI is introducing a novel approach to chip design. It is building an AI system that understands circuit structure and autonomously solves complex design tasks, reducing chip development cycles.

 

 

"Chip design is fundamentally a reasoning problem over an enormous search space, not unlike the kind of reasoning needed to solve hard problems in mathematics. Current AI tools, even the most advanced LLMs, struggle with the deep structural understanding that chip design demands,” said Bragadeesh Suresh Babu, CEO and co-founder, Tattvam AI. “We're building a reasoning model that actually understands circuits from first principles — the constraints, the trade-offs, the interdependencies — the same way a world-class engineer would, and doing it in a fraction of the time."

 

Companies from tech giants to emerging startups are racing to build custom chips. Google has developed its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) optimised for AI workloads, Nvidia has partnered with Groq on specialised AI inference chips, and UK startups Fractile and Olix are building custom processors. They are doing this in pursuit of more powerful, application-tailored silicon that can handle tomorrow's computational demands more efficiently.

 

The stakes are enormous: as AI models grow larger and more complex, and as applications from autonomous vehicles to drug discovery require massive computational power, custom silicon has become a critical competitive advantage.

 

Yet the process to design a chip still takes years of painstaking manual work and the pool of engineers who can do it remains small. Meanwhile, on the software side, AI is already writing complex code at record speed. Tattvam AI aims to bring this transformation to the semiconductor world, enabling more chips to be designed faster and customised for exact applications, making the applications built on top of them dramatically faster.

 

By automating key parts of the design process, Tattvam AI aims to make custom silicon accessible to more companies, reduce development costs, and enable rapid iteration on chip designs — bringing what currently takes two to three years down to weeks.

 

An alumnus of IIT Madras, Babu developed an early passion for mathematics through competitive olympiads before entering the AI and hardware space.

 

He was an early engineer at UK-based brain-monitoring startup CoMind and later became one of the earliest engineers at UK-based chip startup Fractile. Turning down an offer to join Google’s TPU team, Babu chose instead to build Tattvam AI and pursue his vision independently.

 

“Bragadeesh is one of the most driven, energetic and compelling young founders in today’s chip industry. His conviction that Tattvam AI will dramatically speed up the complex and iterative process and models to design chips, cutting timelines from years to weeks, is sure to be embraced by the world’s top teams,” said Stan Boland, former founder and CEO at Icera (bought by Nvidia) and Element 14 (bought by Broadcom).

 

Babu founded Tattvam AI with Lannan Jiang, who has been developing chips at a research lab at ETH Zurich. Tattvam AI plans to launch its first product in the coming months as it works with partners to accelerate the development of next-generation chips.