It takes years to get a chip design on the market. This is because it is difficult to design a chip. Motivo, a startup that was founded five years ago by a veteran of the chip industry, is developing software to speed up chip development. The company today announced a $12 million Series B.The round was led by Intel Capital, along with Storm Ventures and Seraph Group as well as participation of Inventus Capital. With its previous seed funding, the company has raised $20 million.Bharath Rangarajan, Motivo's co-founder and CEO, has been in the chip industry for over 30 years and has seen a few key trends and issues. First, chip design is a time-intensive process that can take years to create a winning candidate.Moores Law, which allows you to fit more electronics on a more powerful chip, increases the complexity of these designs and makes it difficult to produce them once they are in production. Rangarajan founded the company to use artificial intelligence to speed up the process of designing chips and to ensure that they are produced with greater accuracy.An AI engine can be trained to make human judgments and we can do lots of design for manufacturing on the design without any other issues. He said that we can avoid iteration loops and we can also design code, validation, and timing. It was going from weeks to months to days.Their ultimate goal is to reduce the complexity of chip design from three years to three weeks using software and intelligence. They have a product that examines chip layout, the RTL code that runs it, and the netlist that describes how the different pieces on the chip fit together.Another difference is the company's attempt to make its AI transparent so that it can explain how it made certain decisions. Many AI systems are a black box. It is not clear why the self-driving vehicle suddenly chose to steer here. Our AI is understandable. Rangarajan explained that the AI was designed to explain why it is changing the chip in this particular way or why it says change it that way.The company has paying customers. The company cannot name the customers, but there is likely a small market for this type of software. You could guess that it's the chip companies, particularly with Intel Capital as a lead investor in this round. The company currently has 15 employees. Twelve of these are full-time. There are plans to increase the number or triple the number over the next year depending on how things turn out.Rangarajan said that it is difficult to hire people for companies with engineering-focused focus. However, he believes that Rangarajan is looking to keep that diversity going as he grows the company. You are looking for great people from all backgrounds to join our company. The more people you have, the better. He said that we have a lot of industry veterans and still have a diverse team.He said that for now, the office will remain hybrid. People who wish to visit can do so, while those who don't want to be bothered by younger children can work at home. This flexibility should be maintained even after more offices are opened.
