How would you summarize what your startup does in a brief way?

During the last two decades, the complexity of electronic chips has been growing exponentially. Meanwhile, the progression of software solutions for the design of these chips failed to match the same rate, thus deepening even more the on-going chip shortage. AMSIMCEL closes this gap by developing a software tool that speeds-up the design of an electronic circuit and ultimately reduces the time-to-market and overall cost of a chip. 

What is unique about your product/service?

AMSIMCEL’s breakthrough solution, HyperPV, is the first GPU-powered Verification Framework for Integrated Circuits. HyperPV relies on a new set of proprietary algorithms aiming to disrupt the current EDA market. This translates into faster design cycles and lower production costs.

In which stage of development is it?

We have a beta version that is being tested by our partners in South Korea. The stable version is projected to be released in Q4 2023. 

Tell us a bit about the team. How important is team diversity for you?

Our team is comprised of six full-time employees working in an entirely remote environment. I serve as the company’s CTO and I am extremely fortunate to have by my side in the executive team Catalin Tugui as CEO and Anca Marcu as our CFO. Catalin holds a Ph.D. degree in Electronics and has over 10 years’ experience as team leader developing solutions for Semiconductors and EDA industries in an international environment. Anca is a finance professional with over 13 years of experience in IFRS and statutory reporting processes, consolidation of financial statements, financial forecasting, progressive and diverse controlling and FP&A assignments. I am a software engineer with a Ph.D. in Electronics and over 10 years of experience in leading industrial projects (software development for B2B products) in UK, France, Spain and Romania. I am very proud to be part of a passionate team that places innovation at the core of everything that we do. 

What difficulties have you experienced so far?

One of the most challenging missions in our journey was finding the right balance between development and fundraising. Being a deep-tech company and working on a technically complex software we struggled to break the vicious cycle of needing money to develop the product and needing the product to raise money. We were fortunate to receive the support of investors being at the forefront of technological innovation such as GapMinder, Techcelerator, Techangels and PnP. More recently we also received the vote of confidence from the European Innovation Council that awarded us a 4.5M EUR grant that will help us to commercialize our product.

What went better than you expected?

As both Catalin and I have strong technical backgrounds, one of the steps in our journey we enjoyed the most was the actual development of the product. Some of the best early memories we have are the hours spent refining the idea and writing the code. 

In the most favorable scenario, how does your startup look like in the next 2 years? What might not work as planned?

Our main priorities for the next 24 months will be expanding our team and having the product ready for commercial release in Q4 2023. This will position us favorably to access a wider customer network. Some challenges that we might face in this journey are related to the on-going chip crisis. This could impact our customers’ willingness to adopt new technologies that haven’t been extensively validated by the market. Our strategy to mitigate this risk relies on a value-based market approach with a clear benefit-cost analysis. 

What do you require at the moment to accelerate your development?

After securing our series A through funding from the EIC, we are currently focusing on growing our team and we are looking for passionate engineers ready to join our fast-growing startup.

How was the concept born?

The story behind AMSIMCEL started over seven years ago when Catalin was working in the EDA industry and experienced first-hand the limitations of existing solutions. He reached out to me, we discussed the idea, and we saw the potential to have a real impact by building HyperPV. We had already worked together ten years ago, during our PhD years in France, so we were extremely fortunate to have a great team dynamic from the beginning. And here we are, five years into the process of building a company together and our collaboration only got better. 

Something you haven't shared about the startup yet :)

In a world where there is a huge amount of pressure on startup founders to showcase full confidence in their project, we always placed authenticity as a core value for our team. As for any other startup, our journey has been a roller-coaster filled with hard work, excitement, but also doubts and questions.