About Chipmind

We build AI agents for chip design teams.

Founded 2025

Zurich, Switzerland

VC-backed

Founded 2025

Zurich, Switzerland

VC-backed

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

Six people standing in an office near a glass wall with a chipmind logo holding plush toys.
Vision

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.

Team

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

2025

Chipmind AG founded in Zurich

2025

Scientific partnership with ETH Zürich

2025

Closed $2.5M seed round

2026

1st Pilot subscription in the Semiconductor Industry

2026

Chipmind joins CHIPS-JU consortium

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

Six people standing in an office with Chipmind logo on glass wall, two holding plush chipmunk toys.
Six people standing outdoors with mountains and lake in the background under a partly cloudy sky.

Come build with us and shape how chips are designed in the future. Hard problems. Real impact. Zurich-based.

Get started

Ready to see Chipmind in action? Book a Call.

Backed by & Featured in

NVIDIA logo with green eye icon and text NVIDIA in black.
Logo with text 'Chipsju' and three yellow stars above the letters 'ju'.
Innosuisse logo with red Swiss cross shield and black text.
NVIDIA logo with green eye icon and text NVIDIA in black.
Logo with text 'Chipsju' and three yellow stars above the letters 'ju'.
Innosuisse logo with red Swiss cross shield and black text.