<p><strong>SAN JOSE</strong> &#8212; Agentrys, a startup focused on automating and continuously improving chip design, today announced that it has raised $24.5 million in funding. The total 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 funding will go toward recruiting, agent-native tooling, and expanding customer engagements across verification and physical design.</p>
<p>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 Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and AI R&;D experience spanning NVIDIA Research and IBM Research—including leading ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model for chip design —Agentrys was built to close that gap, enabling engineering teams to embed an agentic workforce for chip design directly inside their own workflows.</p>
<p>Agentrys is defining a new category—Agentic Design Automation (ADA)—that evolves chip-design automation from traditional EDA tools focused on individual tasks to intelligent systems that automate, learn from, and continuously improve entire engineering workflows. The company’s long-term vision is to advance self-improving AI for chip design, enabling engineering systems to learn from experience, evolve their capabilities, and tackle increasingly complex design challenges. In leveraging ADA, Agentrys targets the workflows that determine whether chips in the $800+ billion and rapidly growing semiconductor industry ship on time and meet their functional and performance targets.</p>
<p>Agentrys distinguishes itself from other agentic EDA solutions on two fronts. First, it is an open platform customers build on, rather than a fixed set of vendor-controlled agents, enabling them to build and own an agentic engineering workforce tailored to their workflows and spanning commercial EDA tools, internal tools, and infrastructure. Second, 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 accomplish in chip design.</p>
<p>&#8220;Building production-grade agents that reliably automate real engineering work is far from easy — that&#8217;s the problem Agentrys exists to solve,&#8221; said Mark Ren, Founder and CEO of Agentrys. &#8220;We help engineering teams turn manual workflows into an agentic workforce that designs chips faster, delivers better results, and systematically improve in capability over time. That&#8217;s the difference between renting capability everyone else can rent and building an asset that compounds for you alone.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We believe semiconductor R&;D has its own unique domain specificity in agentic AI development,” said Brian Hsu, Managing Director of MediaTek Innovation Fund. &#8220;Agentrys envisions a builder solution that enables semiconductor engineering teams to customize and improve AI agents for chipset design workflows. This could help capture and reuse domain knowledge, hence scale agent development suitable for semiconductor R&;D systematically.&#8221;</p>

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