ChipAgents Founder and CEO Wins Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Says "Believe in Young People"

William Wang, founder and CEO of ChipAgents, received the Entrepreneur of the Year award on June 23 at the South Coast Business & Technology Awards. He was honored for his work building category-defining technologies, advancing the semiconductor industry, and uplifting the community.

The Journey Behind Building ChipAgents

The award caps a journey that began long before the current AI boom. In 2011, as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, William was already experimenting with recurrent neural network language models, years ahead of the deep learning era. His team built an approximate personalized PageRank algorithm that made theorem-proving inference locally groundable.

At UC Santa Barbara, William kept pushing the boundaries of reasoning and learning. In 2017, his research group created DeepPath, one of the first deep reinforcement learning frameworks for reasoning models.

By 2024, it was clear these technologies had matured to the point where they could fundamentally transform how we design and optimize chips (arguably the most complex engineering process humanity has ever invented).

That conviction, built on more than a decade of AI research, became the foundation for ChipAgents.

From Santa Barbara to the Silicon Valley Dream

Since launching in 2024, ChipAgents' momentum has been hard to ignore.

What began as a three-person engineering team in Santa Barbara has grown into a 50-person company building one of the first agentic AI platforms for semiconductor engineering. In less than 24 months, ChipAgents has:

• raised more than $70 million,
• earned backing from leading venture and strategic investors,
• grown ARR 50x year over year,
• expanded product usage by more than 60x,
• and deployed its multi-agent platform across more than 120 semiconductor companies.

With ChipAgents, engineering teams are achieving order-of-magnitude productivity gains across design, verification, and debugging workflows. The company is proving that AI can move beyond copilots and become a core engineering layer for the next generation of chip development. It is, in many ways, a Silicon Valley dream.

Where Education Meets Entrepreneurship

The award is tied to the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, the nation's largest community scholarship foundation, which has awarded more than $130 million to students over the past 60 years.

For William, that connection between education and entrepreneurship is more than symbolic. Before founding ChipAgents, he spent a decade as a UCSB professor, where he saw how much talent can emerge when young people are given the right support, training, and opportunity.

That matters even more as the semiconductor industry faces a growing need for hardware engineers who can build the silicon behind every AI innovation.

"I was a UCSB professor for 10 years before starting the company, so seeing education and entrepreneurship come together is meaningful," William said. "It is so important to the strength of our ecosystem."

William's Message: Believe in Young People

Ask William what he wants people to take from the honor, and his answer is simple: believe in young people.

"Keep investing in young students and training them, even when they don't yet have much experience," William said.

That belief has shaped ChipAgents' culture from the beginning. The company has been built by a team that values speed, ownership, curiosity, and growth. You don't have to wait for young people to become "experienced enough" before giving them meaningful work.

Like many builders in Silicon Valley, William is looking ahead, not back. The next generation of semiconductor breakthroughs will come from teams that are AI-native, willing to challenge old assumptions, fast to learn, and bold enough to build with intensity.

And that future starts by investing in young people today.