UK-based Tattvam AI to automate chip design, eyes India’s semicon opportunity

Tattvam AI, a UK-based startup founded by Bragadeesh Suresh Babu, an IIT Madras alumnus, is looking to automate one of the most complex stages of semiconductor development — chip design itself.

As the global race to build custom silicon intensifies, Tattvam AI is building what it calls the AI layer for semiconductor engineering, aiming to reduce development timelines that currently stretch two to three years down to a matter of weeks. The company emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, led by Seedcamp, with participation from EWOR, Entropy Industrial Ventures, Concept Ventures, and semiconductor veteran Stan Boland.

The timing reflects a broader industry shift. From hyperscalers to AI startups, companies are racing to build application-specific processors tailored for AI training, inference and other high-performance workloads. Custom silicon can deliver dramatically higher performance and improved energy efficiency compared to general-purpose chips.

Global technology leaders such as Google have developed their own AI-focused processors, while Nvidia continues to dominate the AI hardware market. Meanwhile, emerging players, including UK-based Fractile, are building specialised inference chips to meet growing demand.
Despite advances in AI-assisted coding on the software side, chip design remains largely manual, iterative and dependent on a small pool of highly specialised engineers working with complex Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. Tattvam AI is attempting to change that.

“Chip design is fundamentally a reasoning problem over an enormous search space, not unlike the kind of reasoning that’s needed to solve hard problems in mathematics,” said Bragadeesh Suresh Babu, CEO and co-founder of Tattvam AI. 

“Current AI tools, even the most advanced LLMs, struggle with the deep structural understanding that chip design demands. We're building a reasoning model that actually understands circuits from first principles — the constraints, the trade-offs, the interdependencies — the same way a world-class engineer would, and doing it in a fraction of the time.”

The startup’s AI system is designed to deeply understand circuit structure and autonomously solve complex design tasks, navigating trade-offs across power, performance and area. By automating critical parts of the workflow, Tattvam AI aims to reduce costs, accelerate iteration and make custom silicon accessible to more companies.

The India angle is significant. Bragadeesh is an alumnus of IIT Madras, a leading engineering institution that has increasingly become a hub for semiconductor research and deeptech innovation. India has been sharpening its semiconductor ambitions through policy incentives and design-linked schemes, positioning chip design as a strategic opportunity given the country’s strong engineering talent base.

While large-scale fabrication remains capital-intensive, AI-led design automation could expand participation in advanced chip development from Indian engineering teams and startups. Tattvam AI’s founding team spans London and Europe, including co-founder Lannan Jiang, who has been developing chips at a research lab at ETH Zurich.

The company plans to launch its first product in the coming months as it works with partners on next-generation silicon programmes. As AI models scale and computational demands surge across sectors, from mobility to scientific computing, Tattvam AI said it is betting that the next disruption in semiconductors will come not only from new architectures — but also from automating how those architectures are built.