William Yang Wang

Founder and CEO ChipAgents

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

William Yang Wang is the founder and CEO of ChipAgents, which builds AI agents that do real engineering work in semiconductor design: turning specifications and code into RTL, generating verification assets and tracing failures to their root cause. He founded the company, legally Alpha Design AI, in 2024 while a chaired professor of artificial intelligence at UC Santa Barbara, and it has grown quickly. By July 2026 ChipAgents had raised more than $134 million, reported sixfold growth in annual recurring revenue over the first half of the year and was deployed at more than 120 semiconductor companies, including MediaTek and Micron. Wang is a natural-language-processing researcher by training, with a Carnegie Mellon PhD and more than 250 published papers, and he spent 2022 to 2024 working on Amazon Q at AWS before starting the company.

Career Highlights

• Founded ChipAgents in 2024; the company raised a $21 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners in October 2025.
• Expanded the Series A to $134 million in July 2026 with a $60 million Series A2 joined by B Capital, alongside Bessemer, Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson and ScOp.
• Led ChipAgents to deployments at more than 120 semiconductor companies and 6x ARR growth in the first half of 2026.
• Mellichamp Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UC Santa Barbara since 2019, and director of the UCSB NLP Group since 2016.
• Received the 2024 IEEE SPS Pierre-Simon Laplace Award, the 2022 Karen Sparck Jones Award, a 2021 NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Professional Journey

Wang earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and joined UC Santa Barbara’s computer science faculty in 2016, founding and directing its NLP Group. In 2019 he was named Mellichamp Professor of Artificial Intelligence and became director of both the Center for Responsible Machine Learning and the Mind and Machine Intelligence Initiative. His research record is extensive: more than 250 papers, and recognition that includes the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Pierre-Simon Laplace Award, the British Computer Society’s Karen Spärck Jones Award, an NSF CAREER Award and a DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Between 2022 and 2024 he worked with Amazon Web Services, where, by ChipAgents’ account, he helped ship Amazon Q on AWS Bedrock. That experience of putting a large language model product into commercial use preceded the company.

ChipAgents, founded in 2024, applies agentic AI to chip design and verification, a field where engineers spend much of their time writing and debugging hardware description languages such as Verilog and SystemVerilog, and where a design flaw found late is extremely expensive. In October 2025 the company, then about 25 people in Goleta, raised a $21 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners; Wang was reported at the time to be on leave from UCSB. Strategic investors from the chip industry followed, including Micron, MediaTek and Ericsson. In July 2026 ChipAgents announced a further $60 million Series A2, with B Capital as a new investor, bringing the expanded Series A to $134 million six months after its initial close. The company says it is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with research and development in Goleta. It has since announced customer results with Andes Technology and eMemory.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

PhD