Agentrys has raised $24.5 million in total funding to advance autonomous and continuously improving chip design. The total includes an oversubscribed $19.1 million seed round led by Etna Labs and a $5.4 million pre-seed led by MediaTek, the company's first strategic backer. The capital will be used for recruiting, agent-native tooling, and expanding customer engagements across verification and physical design.
Funding and Strategic Backing
The seed round was oversubscribed and led by Etna Labs, a research-driven investment firm that has backed more than 20 AI companies with a focus on foundation models and frontier applications. MediaTek led the earlier pre-seed round, making it the company's first strategic backer. The combined investment gives Agentrys resources to scale its agentic engineering platform across the semiconductor design ecosystem.
The Problem in Chip Design
Chip design has never been more economically important, yet much of the work still depends on scarce experts and thousands of manual engineering hours per chip. Founded by Mark Ren, who brings nearly three decades of EDA and AI research experience from NVIDIA Research and IBM Research, Agentrys was built to close that gap. Ren previously led ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model for chip design, giving him direct insight into how AI can support semiconductor engineering.
A New Automation Category
Agentrys is defining a new category called Agentic Design Automation, or ADA, which moves beyond traditional EDA tools focused on individual tasks. The approach is designed to automate, learn from, and continuously improve entire engineering workflows rather than isolated steps. The company's long-term vision is self-improving AI for chip design, enabling systems to evolve their capabilities and address more complex challenges in the growing semiconductor industry.
Platform Differentiation
Agentrys differs from other agentic EDA solutions by offering an open platform that customers build on rather than a fixed set of vendor-controlled agents. This allows engineering teams to build and own an agentic workforce tailored to their workflows across commercial EDA tools, internal tools, and infrastructure. Its design intelligence layer continuously learns from customer data, usage, and evaluation signals while agent-native tools and custom models extend what general-purpose AI agents can achieve in chip design.
Early Validation and Customer Traction
Agentrys has already demonstrated its platform end to end by taking a 32-bit CPU from specification to sign-off-clean GDS layout with no human in the loop. On NVIDIA's public CVDP verification benchmark, the company is among the first to exceed 90 percent accuracy, with agent evolution techniques systematically improving over successive iterations. It has partnered with several top fabless semiconductor companies, a leading global foundry, and several chip startups while engaging customers across full digital and analog design flows.
Leadership Perspectives
Founder and CEO Mark Ren said Agentrys exists to help engineering teams turn manual workflows into an agentic workforce that designs chips faster and improves over time. Etna Labs' investment team noted that chip design offers rigorous evaluation, making recursive self-improvement practical. MediaTek Innovation Fund Managing Director Brian Hsu added that semiconductor R&D has unique domain specificity, and Agentrys could help teams customize and scale AI agents for chip design.
With the new funding, Agentrys plans to extend its self-improving engineering workforce across the full design flow and make it available to more design teams. The investment signals growing confidence in AI-driven automation for semiconductor development, a sector where design expertise remains scarce and timelines are critical. Agentrys enters its next phase with early technical validation, strategic backing, and customer traction in place.