We build AI agents for chip design teams.
How it started
Built By Engineers Who Have Been There
Dr. Sandro Belfanti and Dr. Harald Kröll spent years building silicon, taping out chips, and launching dev tools across the semiconductor industry. From the trenches of digital design architecture to product management, they hit the same wall repeatedly: time-to-market expectations were shrinking, yet engineers were still burning half their days on repetitive, low-level tasks.
Having watched engineers miss the potential, Sandro and Harald knew that a real solution had to be built from the ground up, by people who actually understood chip design as well as AI. In 2025, they took the leap and founded Chipmind in Zurich - the first European AI chip-design startup.
Today, what started with two founders has grown into the tight-knit team we are now. We are building technology at the fusion of agentic AI and open-source EDA, driven by a clear mission: to bring the fastest end-to-end development experience to our customers. We are building a world where creating custom chips for any purpose is not just possible, but completely effortless.
Where we’ve honed our craft








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Our vision is a world in which it is possible to easily create chips for each purpose with lowest effort.
Chip design has been gated by a fixed supply of senior engineers for two decades. As demand for custom silicon accelerates, the ultimate bottleneck is time-to-market. Slow development means missing critical market windows. Today, generic AI agents promise a 10X speed increase, but the reality is entirely different. Hardware teams end up babysitting chat windows, spending forever trying to explain complex problems, and agonizing over reviews of the raw code the agents spit out.
We believe the chat window has to go away. Chip design is inherently structural, graphical, and holistic. You shouldn't have to explain an SoC architecture through a text prompt. With Chipmind's visual intelligence, you draw, and the agent executes. Moving beyond passive code generation, we provide dynamic, agent-generated UIs that give you true, in-flow autonomy. Our agents read synthesis logs, evaluate timing reports, and balance LLM creativity with strict deterministic gates to ensure the design actually works.
Crucially, your data stays yours. Chipmind is entirely LLM- and EDA-agnostic, giving you the independence to leverage the best vendors and hyperscalers without lock-in. Deployed securely in your environment, our agents automatically capture and learn from your team's workflow. Institutional knowledge no longer falls through the cracks or walks out the door—it stays in-house, continuously compounding and reusable across all current and future projects.
We’re starting in Zurich because keeping the next decade of design IP secure, sovereign, and evolving on this continent matters.
Founding team and partners.

The goal is simple: let AI do the chips, freeing humans to build the impossible.
Dr. Harald Kröll
CEO & Co-Founder

After years at the intersection of AI and digital chip design, I now have a singular focus: building the exact tool I wish I had when I was taping out chips.
Dr. Sandro Belfanti
CTO & Co-Founder

Chipmind is developing cutting-edge, AI-driven EDA in Europe. We need EU startups and champions in this strategic area more than ever.
Prof. Luca Benini
Scientific Advisor
The numbers behind Chipmind. Funding, engagements, and the team building Europe's AI layer for chip design.
$ 2.5M
Seed funding
VC-backed — first external round closed in 2025
5+
Active engagements
European semiconductor teams running Chipmind in real design workflows
30+
Years of experience
Chip design at ON Semi, u-blox · AI research roots at ETH Zürich
Ready to see Chipmind in action? Book a Call.
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