Normal Computing announced it has raised $50 million in strategic funding led by Samsung Catalyst Fund, bringing its total funding to more than $85 million. The round also included participation from Galvanize, Brevan Howard Macro Venture Fund, and ArcTern Ventures, alongside existing investors such as Celesta Capital, Drive Capital, Eric Schmidt’s First Spark Ventures, and Micron Ventures.
Founded in 2022, Normal Computing is focused on addressing two major challenges facing the semiconductor industry: the growing complexity of silicon design and the rising energy demands of AI infrastructure. The company develops AI software for chip design while also building its own hardware IP, aiming to fundamentally reshape semiconductor design.
The company’s core platform, Normal EDA, applies AI techniques, including auto-formalization, which combines large language models with formal logic, to accelerate and improve chip design workflows. This approach enables engineers and AI systems to collaborate more effectively, reducing development timelines from years to months while maintaining high reliability standards required for production silicon.
Normal has already established partnerships with more than half of the top ten semiconductor companies by revenue and is actively contributing to industry standards as a founding member of the Silicon Integration Initiative LLM Benchmarking Coalition.
In parallel, the company is advancing a new class of hardware through its Carnot program. In 2025, Normal completed the tape-out of CN101, described as the world’s first thermodynamic computing chip. This architecture is designed to improve efficiency by leveraging physical system dynamics rather than suppressing them, potentially enabling up to 1000x gains in energy efficiency for AI workloads such as image and video generation.
This effort is supported in part by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency through its Scaling Compute Programme, which backs high-risk, high-impact computing innovations.
With this funding, Normal Computing plans to further scale its AI-driven design platform and continue developing next-generation computing architectures to significantly improve intelligence per dollar and per watt in AI systems.
KEY QUOTES:
“Datacenters are expected to hit an energy wall around 2030. Finding more energy is not a durable strategy. Meeting growing ‘intelligence per dollar per Watt’ demands a fundamentally novel architecture, and a unification in design methodology. Normal EDA exists to accelerate custom silicon to market by 2x today, and, over time, to enable 1000x gains in efficiency with our platform.”
Faris Sbahi, CEO of Normal Computing
“Our industry is facing unprecedented transformation propelled by AI, and the complexity of leading-edge semiconductor chip design has increased dramatically. Normal has assembled a strong team with broad experience across AI and semiconductors. The platform they have built has the potential to offer faster time-to-market for the most demanding chip design customers in the ecosystem. We are very excited to support them and lead this financing round.”
Dede Goldschmidt, SVP & Managing Director, Head of Samsung Catalyst Fund
“Most of the advanced computing landscape is oriented toward the next incremental improvement. ARIA exists to fund the ideas where the potential impact is not marginal but transformational, even when the technical risk is high. Normal’s team has taken a fundamentally unconventional approach and delivered working silicon in CN101. That is an exceptionally rare outcome for work this ambitious and we are excited to witness this next phase of the journey.”
Dr. Suraj Bramhavar, Programme Director of ARIA’s Scaling Compute Programme
