Latest AI News
Cognichip wants AI to design the chips that power AI, and just raised $60M to try
The most advanced silicon chips have accelerated the development of artificial intelligence. Now, can AI return the favor? Cognichipis building a deep learning model to work alongside engineers as they design new computer chips. The problem it is trying to solve is one the industry has lived with for decades: chip design is enormously complex, ruinously expensive, and slow. Advanced chips take three to five years to go from conception to mass production; the design phase alone can take as long as two years before physical layout begins. Consider that the latest line of Nvidia GPUs, Blackwell, contains 104 billion transistors — that’s a lot to line up. In the time it takes to create a new chip, Cognichip CEO and founder Faraj Aalaei says, the market can change and make all that investment a waste. Aalaei’s goal is to bring the kind of AI tools that software engineers have used to speed their work into the semiconductor design space. “These systems have now become intelligent enough that by just guiding them and telling them what the result is that you want, it can actually produce beautiful code,” Aalaei told TechCrunch. He says the firm’s technology can reduce the cost of chip development by more than 75% and cut the timeline by more than half. The company emerged from stealth last year and said Wednesday that it had raised $60 million in new funding led by Seligman Ventures, with notable participation from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who invested through his venture firm Walden Catalyst Ventures and will be joining Cognichip’s board. Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman, will also join the board. Cognichip has now raised $93 million altogether since its founding in 2024. Still, Cognichip can’t yet point to a new chip designed with its system and did not disclose any of the customers it says it has been collaborating with since September. The company says its advantage is in using its own model trained on chip design data, rather than starting with a general-purpose LLM. That required getting access to domain-specific training data, which is no small feat. Unlike software developers, who share vast amounts of code openly, chip designers guard their IP closely, making the kind of open-source trove that typically trains AI coding assistants largely unavailable. Cognichip has had to develop its own data sets, including synthetic data, and license data from partners. The firm has also developed procedures to allow chipmakers to securely train Cognichip’s models on their own proprietary data without exposing it. Where proprietary data isn’t available, Cognichip has leaned on open-source alternatives. In one demo last year, Cognichip invited electrical engineering students at San Jose State University to try the model in a hackathon. The teams were able to use the model to design CPUs based on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture — a freely available design that anyone can build on. Cognichip is competing against incumbent players like Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems, as well as a crop of well-funded startups. Among them: Alpha Design AI, which raised $21 million Series A in October 2025, and ChipAgentsAI, which closed a $74 million extended Series A in February. Padval said that the current flood of capital into AI infrastructure is the largest he’s seen in 40 years of investing. “If it’s a super cycle for semiconductors and hardware, it’s a super cycle for companies like [Cognichip],” he said.
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SimplifyX Webinar: Building AI That Actually Delivers ROI
The webinar will outline a practical AI adoption model, avoiding short-term hype while helping leadership align expectations with achievable outcomes.
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Govt Moves 16.68 Lakh Email Accounts to Zoho Cloud in a ₹180 Cr Migration
The central government said its main focus is on cloud migration to ensure a secure, sovereign email system with full data ownership.
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GCCs Don’t Wait For Consulting Decks Anymore. They Run Claude
Strategic thinking is becoming a continuous process, evolving from Day 0 through Year 10 of a GCC’s lifecycle.
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Build Intelligent Video Experiences with Zoom’s AI & Developer Platform
Harness the power of Zoom’s AI innovations, Intelligence APIs, and real-time media streams to create smarter, more engaging video experiences.
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OpenAI Raises $122 Billion in Latest Funding Round, Says Building Unified AI Superapp
OpenAI, on Tuesday, announced the completion of its latest funding round. The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) giant raised $122 billion (roughly Rs. 11.37 lakh crore) in this funding round. Additionally, for the first time, the company opened participation to retail investors, raising $3 billion (roughly Rs. 28,000 crore) through bank channels. While the AI firm did not mention where it plans to spend the funds, it did reveal that a unified AI superapp is on the way. Interestingly, OpenAI claimed that it is growing its revenue four times faster than Google and Meta.
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Attrition Study of AI and Data Professionals in India
Attrition among AI and data professionals in India varies significantly across roles, experience levels, organisations, sectors, and geographies. Emerging AI roles and early-career professionals show higher attrition, while enterprise-aligned roles and senior professionals reflect more stable patterns. As AI adoption evolves, workforce dynamics are expected to shift, with continued demand for advanced skills shaping talent movement.
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ServiceNow Names Kulmeet Bawa MD and GVP for India & SAARC
Before entering the technology sector, Bawa served for more than 12 years as a cavalry officer in the Indian Army.
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EaseMyTrip Partners with NSDC, Sanatan AI to Formalise India’s Spiritual Services Economy
The initiative proposes deployment across up to two lakh panchayats over five years, creating a decentralised network of certified micro-entrepreneurs.
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Xovian Aerospace Secures $2 Mn to Expand AI-Native Space Intelligence Platform
The startup is developing AI-powered RF satellites that transform radio frequency data into actionable intelligence.
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This Startup Wants to be GitHub for Nutraceuticals
Bettrlabs is reimagining product development by moving the entire R&D lifecycle to the cloud, combining proprietary data with layered AI.
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Gmail's AI Inbox Feature With Smart Prioritisation Rolls Out for Google AI Ultra Subscribers in the US
Gmail is rolling out its AI-powered Inbox feature to select Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, expanding on the Gemini-driven updates it introduced earlier this year. The new feature adds a dedicated AI view within Gmail that highlights priority emails, surfaces actionable tasks, and groups less urgent updates into summaries. It is said to be designed to reduce inbox clutter and help users quickly focus on what matters most, building on Google's broader push to integrate AI more deeply across its email experience.
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