Team Startupcity

• Bengaluru-based Maieutic, founded by Gireesh Rajendran and team, is building the world’s first GenAI copilot for analogue chip design.
• The AI tool aims to cut design cycles from weeks to days, automate non-creative tasks, and assist circuit designers with precision and trade-off decisions.
• Backed by Endiya Partners, Maieutic will use fresh capital to double its engineering team and accelerate platform development ahead of deployment.

The Bengaluru startup was started by Gireesh Rajendran, Ashish Lachhwani, Rakesh Kumar, and Krishna Sankar. Maieutic is working on what it describes as the world's first GenAI copilot for analogue design. The platform will accelerate the initial stages of chip development, detect bugs autonomously, and enhance decision-making on design trade-offs.

With the new capital, Maieutic aims to double the size of its engineering team and significantly enhance time to market. The firm is also adding headcount to flesh out its platform. Deployment of its product has yet to start.

Semiconductor design has been immune to change and productivity improvements, cofounder and CEO Rajendra said in an interview. "Maieutic's copilot can shorten the design cycle from weeks to days, identify inconsistencies autonomously, and apply intelligence to all trade-offs", he said.

The firm went ahead to develop its own AI platform since designing chips involves a lot of specialized know-how, which is not found in a general model. Therefore, the initial work was to establish a clean enough data set that could be employed to assist particular circuit designers.

"When we perform the process, there are plenty of manual tasks pertaining specifically to circuit design in making test benches, sketching circuits, tying outputs, and probing. So, with this agentic workflow, there is space to automate all of these non-creative tasks, leaving the designer to only do the creative tasks", CTO Sankar described.

Hallucinations in AI is an important one to crack, Sankar said, because to the circuit designer, precision is everything. "The tool will have sufficient guardrails or training data surrounding it to assist in ensuring the designer receives the correct responses", he said.

"Maieutic is addressing a genuine challenge in the space of semiconductor design, a domain that has hitherto defied automation even as it becomes increasingly complex. Analogue flows especially have been very manual and time-consuming with heavy reliance on domain knowledge", Endiya Partners managing partner Sateesh Andra said in a statement.