In 2026, Sonya Jin and Aadi Nashikkar-led Phinity Labs raised $5.2 million to let AI agents design computer chips from text prompts

Phinity Labs, co-founded by Sonya Jin and Aadi Nashikkar, has raised $5.2 million in seed funding and come out of stealth mode. The startup is building AI agents that design computer chips from text prompts.

Stealth mode means a company works without public announcements. Phinity ended that phase and announced the funding on the same day.

Phinity Labs came out of stealth with a $5.2 million seed round

Uncork Capital led the round. Moxxie also took part, along with several angel investors. One of them is Jeff Dean, who is best known for his work at Google.

A seed round is usually a young company’s first large outside financing. Phinity had already raised a pre-seed round, which is an earlier and smaller stage. That round was led by Pear through its PearX programme.

Gunderson Dettmer, a law firm that works with startups, represented Phinity in the deal. The team was led by Damon Zhangchai and included Mark Mabry.

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Phinity’s stated aim is fully autonomous chip design. In the company’s words, the point is to let AI search beyond the limits of human engineering and find new computational systems.

The funding will go towards building the infrastructure for a “closed-loop” system. In a closed loop, the result of each test feeds back into the next round of design. Phinity says its agents will design, evaluate and revise computational systems this way, using real physical feedback.

The announcement doesn’t explain what that feedback looks like in practice.

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The work is meant to cover the full path, from architecture discovery through tape out. Architecture is the overall plan for how a chip is organised and what it can do. Tape out is the final step, when a finished design is sent off to be manufactured. So the company is aiming at everything between the first idea and a design that is ready for the factory.

That is a wider target than helping engineers with one stage of the process. It is also a claim about what the company intends to build. The announcement doesn’t say how much of it exists today.

The founders say chip design has to change

In the announcement, Jin and Nashikkar said, “We founded Phinity because we believe the way we design chips has to change if we want to keep pushing the frontier.” They added, “We’re building towards a future where we can explore computational systems beyond the reach of human search. We’ll be able to discover entirely new architectures and turn them into the silicon that powers the next generation of intelligence.”

Silicon here means the chips themselves. The founders are saying that people can only search through so many possible designs, and that AI agents might reach designs people wouldn’t think to try. That is their argument, and the announcement doesn’t offer test results to back it up.

Phinity hasn’t said what the company is valued at. It hasn’t said whether it has customers or revenue, or when a product might be available. It also hasn’t shared how much each investor put in.