VerifAIX, an AI-native semiconductor verification company, has raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by Endiya Partners and Bluehill VC. The round marks the company’s first institutional funding and will support product development, customer deployments and expansion of its engineering teams across US, India and Israel.
As chip complexity rises and AI becomes increasingly embedded in semiconductor design, a fundamental challenge is emerging: if AI helps design a chip, how do engineering teams independently establish that what it generates is correct?
VerifAIX is building a verification trust layer to address this challenge. At the core of its platform is a “Formal Brain” that creates a mathematically grounded understanding of a design and its intended behaviour. It reasons across specifications, RTL and verification assets to identify inconsistencies and gaps, and uses this foundation to drive verification planning, formal analysis, simulation, coverage, debug and verification closure.
Unlike approaches focused primarily on generating verification code using LLMs, VerifAIX combines AI reasoning with deterministic, mathematically rigorous verification. Its platform integrates specification-to-RTL reasoning, automated decomposition and abstraction, and coordinated formal and simulation verification to tackle complex designs while maintaining traceability to design intent.
VerifAIX was founded by Madhulima Tewari, Kenneth Roe and Avner Landver, bringing together deep experience across AI, semiconductor design, formal and functional verification, mathematical methods, EDA and complex chip development. Madhulima has worked across AI/NLP, enterprise software and semiconductor EDA. Ken has spent decades in formal verification, including building production verification infrastructure at Intel and working at SiFive and Synopsys. Avner brings deep expertise in semiconductor verification methodology, formal methods and EDA tool development, shaped by his work across Apple, Intel, Cadence and IBM Research. Dr. Aarti Gupta, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, serves as Founding Consultant. Vin Dham, one of the pioneers behind Intel’s Pentium processor, serves as Founding Advisor and investor
“AI is changing how semiconductor designs are created, but generating a design is not the same as proving that it is correct,” said Madhulima Tewari, CEO, VerifAIX. “As AI becomes part of the engineering process, the industry needs an independent layer of trust that can establish correctness and preserve traceability to design intent. Our vision is to build that verification trust layer for AI-driven semiconductor development, and this funding enables us to deepen the technology and take the platform to increasingly complex designs and customers”
VerifAIX has built a working platform that is being deployed with multiple semiconductor companies on real-world verification challenges, including complex control-intensive and protocol-heavy designs. The company is targeting a broad range of custom-silicon developers, including semiconductor and IP companies, processor and AI accelerator developers, hyperscalers and systems companies.
“AI is accelerating chip creation, but correctness is becoming the bottleneck. VerifAIX stood out for its approach to this trust problem, combining AI with a mathematically grounded Formal Brain, built by a team with rare depth across AI, formal verification and semiconductors. We believe VerifAIX can become a critical trust layer in the semiconductor engineering stack,” said Medha Kannapally, Endiya Partners.
“Verification is already one of the most difficult and resource-intensive parts of chip development, and the challenge will only grow as designs become more complex and AI accelerates engineering,” said Sridhar Parthasarathi, Bluehill VC. “VerifAIX combines AI with rigorous verification technology and deep semiconductor expertise. Its early customer work demonstrates the potential for a verification trust layer that semiconductor teams can rely on as AI becomes more deeply integrated into chip design workflows.”
The funding will be used to advance VerifAIX’s Formal Brain, scale automated abstraction and decomposition to larger designs, strengthen formal and simulation capabilities, and expand customer deployments. The company will also grow its engineering teams in US, India and Israel, with a focus on AI research, formal verification and semiconductor engineering.