Semiconductor verification startup VerifAIX has raised $5 Mn (Rs 48 Cr) in a seed round co-led by Endiya Partners and Bluehill VC. It is the company’s first institutional round.
VerifAIX will use the money to build its product, add customers, and grow its engineering teams across the US, India, and Israel. The company shared the plan in a press release on September 16, 2026.
Madhulima Tewari, Kenneth Roe, and Avner Landver founded VerifAIX in 2024. It builds an AI-native platform that helps chip engineers check whether a design does what it should.
The problem it targets is new. AI now writes large parts of chip designs, including register-transfer level code, known as RTL.
Faster design has created a fresh need: someone must prove the AI-made design is correct.
The VerifAIX answer is a “verification trust layer” for AI-driven chip design. At its centre sits a system VerifAIX calls the Formal Brain.
The Formal Brain builds a mathematically grounded picture of a chip design and how it should behave. It reads specifications, RTL code, and verification assets to find gaps and contradictions. Flagged errors come with suggested fixes.
VerifAIX says its platform mixes AI reasoning with strict, mathematically rigorous checks. That sets it apart from tools that only use large language models to write verification code. Its AI agents cover planning, testbench generation, formal analysis, simulation, coverage, and debugging.
Madhulima Tewari, the chief executive of VerifAIX, framed the gap simply. “AI is changing how semiconductor designs are created, but generating a design is not the same as proving that it is correct,” she said.
The startup is going after chip and chip-IP firms, processor and AI accelerator makers, hyperscalers, and other custom-silicon builders. It treats electronic design automation vendors as partners, not customers.
The round lands as money flows into Indian chip startups. These firms raised $61.9 Mn (Rs 594 Cr) in the first half of 2026.
A Speciale Invest and Startup Policy Forum report found these startups have raised about $206 Mn (Rs 1,978 Cr) in total since 2022.
HrdWyr raised $13 Mn (Rs 125 Cr) earlier this year for its AI-native chips.
What this means for you: If you build or fund deep-tech, VerifAIX bets that checking AI’s work becomes its own market, apart from the tools that make chips.
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