ChipFlow, a Cambridge, UK-based startup building an open-source semiconductor chip design platform (PaaS), has raised £1.2 million in a pre-seed round of financing.
The round was led by Fontinalis Partners and included investments from Fuel Ventures, InMotion Ventures, APX, and others.
The new funding will be instrumental in expanding ChipFlow’s team, enabling the company to attract top-tier engineering talent to further enhance its open-source software tools and accelerate product development efforts, while supporting the progression of ChipFlow’s early commercial engagements.
“We believe that open-source silicon design represents a transformational shift that is occurring, and we founded ChipFlow to be at the forefront of that movement,” commented Rob Taylor, CEO and co-founder at ChipFlow. “This round of capital, and importantly the investors behind it, serves both as early validation to the global scale of our vision and provides the firepower to execute upon our ambitions.”
To date, ChipFlow is building upon Amaranth, a novel, Python-based hardware description language that transforms productivity for designing digital ICs.
The ChipFlow platform provides cloud-scalable debug, test, simulation, and formal verification frameworks out of the box, connecting this with both industry-standard semiconductor foundries and novel IC manufacturing processes, like plastic chips, GaN and SiGe.
ChipFlow aims to accelerate a budding transformation that’s occurring in open-source silicon design by integrating and building upon a set of novel tools and datasets being developed in real-time.
Company: ChipFlow Ltd.
Raised: £1.2M
Round: Pre-Seed
Funding Month: July 2023
Lead Investors: Fontinalis Partners
Additional Investors: Fuel Ventures, InMotion Ventures, and APX
Company Website: https://www.chipflow.io/
Software Category: Open Source Semiconductor Chip Design Platform
About the Company: Founded in 2021 by a co-Founder team of 10, ChipFlow is currently building its MVP platform offering together with lead customers across several sectors, including automotive. ChipFlow’s market-disrupting Platform as a Service offering will provide a new, significantly more affordable way for OEMs to design and order integrated circuits. ChipFlow has collaborated closely with several leaders across the broader open-source software, hardware, and chip design industries, having received significant early contributions from Ian Page, Matt Venn, Michel Laudes, Catherine Zotova, and Myrtle Shah.
Source: https://www.uktechnews.info/2023/07/06/chipflow-secures-1-2million-pre-seed-investment-led-by-fontinalis-partners/