Architect Labs, a startup focused on accelerating custom silicon development, has officially emerged from stealth mode after securing $24 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Kindred Ventures and attracted participation from TQ Ventures, Race Capital, Together Fund, and several prominent leaders from the AI and computing sectors.
Among the backers are industry figures such as Srinivas Narayanan, Lukasz Kaiser, Aravind Srinivas, Kunle Olukotun, Trevor Blackwell, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross and Shaad Khan, alongside executives associated with leading technology companies including NVIDIA, Google and OpenAI. As part of the investment, Kindred Ventures founder and managing partner Steve Jang has joined Architect Labs’ board of directors.
The world needs more chip designs than we can produce today
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is reshaping the hardware landscape, driving demand for specialized computing infrastructure tailored to increasingly complex workloads. Traditional hardware architectures built around standard CPU, GPU and memory configurations are giving way to highly integrated systems powered by custom silicon, enabling greater performance, efficiency and scalability. While this transformation began in data centers, it is now extending across sectors including robotics, autonomous technologies, spatial computing, defense, consumer electronics and wearable devices.
Despite growing demand, custom chip development remains a highly complex undertaking, often requiring years of engineering effort, substantial financial investment and access to a limited pool of specialized talent. These barriers have historically restricted advanced chip design to a small number of large technology companies.
Architect Labs aims to address this challenge by developing an AI-powered platform for custom chip design and full-stack silicon development. The company works with enterprises, AI research organizations and governments to translate demanding computing workloads into purpose-built silicon solutions, with the goal of reducing development timelines and expanding access to custom chip technology.
The semiconductor industry underwent a major transformation with the rise of the fabless model, which enabled companies to develop chips without investing in their own manufacturing facilities. By making advanced chip fabrication widely accessible, foundries such as TSMC lowered barriers to entry and accelerated innovation across the industry.
Architect Labs is seeking to bring a similar shift to the chip design process itself. The company envisions a future in which organizations can access advanced semiconductor design capabilities without building large in-house engineering teams or committing to long-term architecture strategies. Describing this approach as a “designless” semiconductor model, Architect Labs aims to help customers develop custom silicon tailored to their specific workloads while reducing the complexity, cost and risks traditionally associated with chip development and tape-outs.
“AI models have advanced dramatically across nearly every field, yet chip development cycles remain equally slow and painful,” said Ebrahim Hussain, co-founder of Architect Labs. “Unlocking AI-first semiconductor design requires a first-principles rethink of the entire design process, not forcing AI agents into workflows that were never built for them.”
Closing the loop between hardware and AI
Looking ahead, Architect Labs plans to expand both its technology platform and industry collaborations across the broader computing ecosystem. Beyond chip design, the company intends to support the co-development of compilers, runtime environments, system software and, eventually, AI models themselves, creating a more integrated approach to hardware and software optimization.
The company believes that bringing semiconductor development closer to the speed and flexibility of software engineering could enable tighter alignment between silicon, system architectures and AI workloads. By allowing hardware and software to evolve together, organizations may be able to achieve faster innovation cycles, improved performance and more efficient computing platforms. Architect Labs sees this convergence as a key step toward accelerating the next generation of artificial intelligence and advanced computing systems.
“We are just now entering into an era of custom chips for various systems and workload types. To achieve this ideal diversity of AI infrastructure, research labs, software platforms, robotics makers, and cloud operators all need to be able to iterate on novel chip hardware at the same pace and creativity as model development,” said Steve Jang, founder of Kindred Ventures. “Using AI for chip co-design, Architect Labs proposes to deliver on this vision of ultra-low latency, energy-efficient, and affordable intelligence at scale.”
This shift expands access to custom silicon far beyond a small set of companies, enabling more organizations to build specialized hardware infrastructure superior in economics, performance, and power efficiency.
The Team
Architect Labs was founded by Ebrahim Hussain and Aaditya Subedi. Hussain skipped high school to enroll in college at 15 and went to work on custom chips at Apple and Tesla. Subedi was an AI researcher at Harvard, working on code verification using AI. The two met at Stanford, where their research focused on building AI systems for chip design and verification. Noticing the gap between the rate of AI progress and underlying hardware, they dropped out of school to start Architect Labs.
The founders have assembled a team of frontier AI researchers, former professors, chip designers, and systems engineers. The team has collectively taped out 80+ production chips, ran $10B+ product lines at Intel’s Data Center Division, taped out one of the first neuromorphic chips at Intel’s AI lab, been core contributors to Meta’s custom silicon, led ML research teams at Anthropic, DeepMind, and xAI, and contributed to core AI research at nearly every frontier lab.
Architect Labs will use the funding to scale its compute infrastructure, deepen its AI research, and co-design production silicon with early industry partners. With demand for specialized AI infrastructure continuing to grow, Architect Labs is positioning itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and semiconductor innovation, aiming to reduce barriers to custom chip development and accelerate the adoption of purpose-built silicon solutions.
