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.

About Cognichip

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
ACI chip design visualizationsACI chip design visualizationsACI chip design visualizationsACI chip design visualizationsACI chip design visualizationsACI chip design visualizations

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

Faraj Aalaei

Founder

2X Tech Founder/CEO

2x IPO as CEOAT&T Bell Labs
Ehsan Kamalinejad

Ehsan Kamalinejad

Co-founder

Chief Technology Officer

AI Lead @ AmazonSr ML Scientist @ ApplePhD, U of Toronto
Simon Sabato

Simon Sabato

Co-founder

Chief Architect

VP HW @ Lilac/F5HW Lead @ GooglePrincipal Eng @ CiscoUC Berkeley, EE
Stelios Diamantidis

Stelios Diamantidis

Founding

Chief Product Officer

AI Architect @ SynopsysFounder/CEO @ GlobetechStanford, EE
Mehdi Daneshpanah

Mehdi Daneshpanah

Founding

SVP of Engineering

Sr. Dir Eng @ KLAApplied Scientist @ GEEECS Ph.D., UConn

Members of the Board

Umesh PadvalSeligman Ventures

Umesh Padval

Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures

Lip-Bu TanIntel

Lip-Bu Tan

CEO, Intel

Shahin FarshchiLux Capital

Shahin Farshchi

Partner, Lux Capital

Science & business advisors

Amin Saberi

Amin Saberi

Science Advisor

Professor, StanfordLanguage, Data, Reasoning2x ACM ToT Awards
Peyman Esfahani

Peyman Esfahani

Science Advisor

Professor, U of TorontoControl, Optimization, & MLIEEE, European Control & INFORMS Award
Ant van Rensburg

Ant van Rensburg

Business Advisor

SVP Strategy & Ops @ RobloxVP Finance @ GooglePrincipal @ BCGNorthwestern MBA
Hassan Parsa

Hassan Parsa

Business Advisor

VP Corp Dev @ ARM50+ Tech Acq/InvestmentsColumbia MBA
Michael Sanie

Michael Sanie

Business Advisor

CMO @ SynopsysVP, MBD @ CadencePurdue EE

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.