TenX Semi Emerges From Stealth With Backing From South Park Commons, Khosla Ventures

Agentic AI has started helping design chips — and in doing so, made verification the new bottleneck. Design gets faster, but confirming the result is actually correct still falls largely on humans, just shifting the chokepoint rather than removing it.

A startup built to tackle that head-on has come out of stealth. Silicon Valley-based TenX Semi has raised funding from South Park Commons and Khosla Ventures, the company announced. TenX builds autonomous chip design tools and agents that treat design and verification as one loop rather than separate steps. Its proprietary “self-verify-and-fix” technology detects bugs, narrows down the cause, and fixes them in a repeating cycle — shortening design timelines while improving quality, according to the company. Per its website, a Tier-1 customer used the tools to uncover a critical bug in a production design in under two weeks, and the company has demonstrated verification 30 times faster than traditional industry flows (the customer wasn’t named).

The three co-founders span semiconductors, chip design, and AI research. CEO Dr. SukHwan Lim spent 21 years leading imaging and vision/ML hardware and software teams at Samsung, Google, Apple, and HP, most recently as Corporate EVP heading Samsung Electronics’ System LSI R&D Center America and, before that, Corporate SVP for Multimedia and AI/ML. Professor Subhasish Mitra holds the William E. Ayer Endowed Chair at Stanford, where he directs the Robust Systems Group, and created X-Compact, now an industry-standard chip verification technique; he also serves on the leadership team of the CHIPS Act-funded Microelectronics Commons AI Hardware Hub. Dr. Shwetabh Verma holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and previously worked as a hardware architect at Apple, IC design manager at Broadcom, and senior group director at Cadence Design Systems.

TenX Semi said South Park Commons and Khosla Ventures led its early funding; the company did not disclose an amount. According to the newsletter Stealth Startup Spy, which tracks startups exiting stealth, TenX had been operating in stealth for roughly 15 months before today’s announcement. The company said it’s hiring for autonomous chip design roles.

The agentic chip design race

Agentic chip design has drawn a cluster of well-funded startups over the past year. ChipAgents has raised $74 million total, including an oversubscribed $50 million round, to expand its agentic AI platform and multi-agent chip design teams. Cognichip, personally backed by Intel’s CEO, raised a $60 million Series A behind its chip-design-specific AI foundation model, ACI (Artificial Chip Intelligence). Ricursive Intelligence, founded by the creators of Google’s AlphaChip, raised a $300 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $4 billion valuation. Palo Alto-based Vinci came out of stealth in December with $46 million in combined seed and Series A funding — Khosla Ventures was also among its investors, though it’s a separate company from TenX. Where most of these rivals focus on design speed itself, TenX’s pitch is tying verification into the same loop as design.