Agentrys, a semiconductor AI startup founded by former NVIDIA Research and IBM Research leader Mark Ren, has raised $24.5 million to build what it calls Agentic Design Automation (ADA) — an open platform that lets chip engineering teams build and own a self-improving AI-agent workforce.
Etna Labs Leads, MediaTek Is Strategic Anchor
The financing comprises an oversubscribed $19.1 million seed round led by Etna Labs, following a $5.4 million pre-seed led by MediaTek, the company's first strategic backer. The new capital will fund recruiting, agent-native tooling and expanded engagements across verification and physical design flows.
A New Category Above EDA
Agentrys is positioning ADA as a layer that sits above traditional Electronic Design Automation, learning from customer data and evaluation signals to continuously improve. The company has already demonstrated its platform end-to-end, running an autonomous multi-agent workflow that took a 32-bit CPU from specification to sign-off-clean GDS layout with no human in the loop, and is among the first to exceed 90% accuracy on NVIDIA's public CVDP verification benchmark.
Mark Ren's ChipNeMo Lineage
Ren spent close to three decades at NVIDIA Research and IBM Research and led ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model for chip design. "That's the difference between renting capability everyone else can rent and building an asset that compounds for you alone," he said in a statement, framing ADA as a shift from one-off tools to durable in-house engineering IP.
Momentum In A Hot Corner Of AI
The raise lands as semiconductor AI heats up. Rival Anthropic just closed a $45B compute deal with Nscale, and Intel unveiled its 256-core Diamond Rapids Xeon at Hot Chips 2026. Agentrys says it is already engaged with several of the world's top fabless semiconductor companies, a leading global foundry, and multiple chip startups.
Reporting based on coverage from Semiconductor Digest, SemiWiki and Tech Startups.