Chip design is one of the most valuable engineering processes on the planet, powering everything from the phone in your pocket to the data centers training AI models.
It’s also one of the most costly and time-consuming, absorbing almost $80 billion of R&D spend every year. It’s painstaking work: a single chip can take years and hundreds of engineers to bring from concept to production. A single mistake caught late can send you right back to the start.
Every major tech company is racing to build their own custom silicon. Designed from scratch for a single workload, these custom chips have become table stakes for AI, where a chip built for your exact AI model can mean orders of magnitude in cost, speed, and capability, compared to off-the-shelf alternatives.
But the design process hasn’t kept pace — and that’s why we’re so excited to back Tattvam AI.
Tattvam AI introduces a truly novel approach to custom chip design. Rather than automating surface-level tasks, its AI system understands circuit structure at a deep level and can autonomously solve complex design tasks, slashing the design process by months.
London-based Tattvam AI is emerging from stealth today with $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, led by Seedcamp with participation from EWOR, Entropy Industrial Ventures, Concept Ventures, and semiconductor angel Stan Boland.
“Seedcamp backed our vision to rethink chip design from day one, and the team’s support has already been invaluable as we grow the company. They are exactly the kind of partner ambitious founders need in the earliest stages,” said Bragadeesh, commenting on Tattvam’s relationship with Seedcamp.
"Seedcamp backed our vision to rethink chip design from day one, and the team’s support has already been invaluable as we grow the company. They are exactly the kind of partner ambitious founders need in the earliest stages."Bragadeesh ~ Founder, Tattvam
What impressed us most about Tattvam AI’s founding team is that they combine hands-on experience in chip design with unwavering conviction that the design process can be improved.
CEO Bragadeesh turned down an offer to join Google’s TPU team to build Tattvam AI, signalling his conviction. Prior to that, he was an early engineer at brain-monitoring startup CoMind (which recently raised $100m), and then one of the earliest engineers at UK chip startup Fractile.
His co-founder, Lannan Jiang, also has deep, hands-on experience in chip design, having built high-performance chips at a research lab at ETH Zurich.
“Chip design is fundamentally a reasoning problem over an enormous search space, not unlike the kind of reasoning that’s needed to solve hard problems in mathematics.” said Bragadeesh. “Current AI tools, even the most advanced LLMs, struggle with the deep structural understanding that chip design demands. We’re building a reasoning model that actually understands circuits from first principles – the constraints, the tradeoffs, the interdependencies – the same way a world-class engineer would, and doing it in a fraction of the time.”
Investors were drawn to both the insight and the team. “Bragadeesh is one of the most driven, energetic and compelling young founders in today’s chip industry,” said Stan Boland, former founder and CEO of Icera (acquired by NVIDIA) and Element 14 (acquired by Broadcom). “His conviction that Tattvam will cut chip design timelines from years to weeks is sure to be embraced by the world’s top teams.”
“Despite a deep lack of data — semiconductor designs are almost universally closed source — the Tattvam team has hustled its way into the hallowed hallways of the semiconductor industry to unlock the beginnings of a world-class product,” added Will Bennett, Investor at Seedcamp.
“We couldn’t be more proud to lead Tattvam’s pre-seed and partner up with Bragadeesh and Lannan, who have already achieved physics-defying feats at CoMind, Fractile and Analog Devices.”
"Despite a deep lack of data — semiconductor designs are almost universally closed source — the Tattvam team has hustled its way into the hallowed hallways of the semiconductor industry to unlock the beginnings of a world-class product."Will Bennett ~ Seedcamp
Tattvam AI plans to launch its first product in the coming months.
For more information, visit www.tattvamlabs.ai.