▶ 155:52 · $COGNI-CHIP · Cogni Chip CEO: AI for semiconductor design (ACI) collapses 5-year chip cycles using proprietary dataset

episode briefing

Pacing the Frontier, Perfect Little Angels, Nico Wittenborn IRL, Home Depot with Acquired

2026-09-14 · 8 company · 0 thematic

sentiment

7 bull0 bear1 neu

speakers

nico wettenborn

Former investor at Point Nine (early Zendesk, Loom) and Insight Partners (consumer mobile); founded Adjacent in 2019 as solo GP, now investing Fund IV; backed Aura, Speechify, RevenueCat, Popcorn, Inversion Space, Tractive (sold to Bending Spoons).

scott

Co-founder of Cognition, an AI coding agent company. Former founder hired by Joe Lonsdale in a previous venture. Leads a team of 20+ Olympiad gold medalists building autonomous software engineering agents.

ben

Co-host of the Acquired podcast with David, which analyzes business histories and strategies. They interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin about his media career and productivity.

farajali

40-year semiconductor veteran; founded two public semiconductor companies (DSL and 10G data center chips); now building AI for chip design (ACI) to collapse design cycles using proprietary dataset and physicist-designer pairing.

quote

“we call it ACI, artificial chip intelligence and giving that focus and that particular um sliver of the world knowledge uh required really to bring together um you know scientists from math and physics and pair them up with people who have…”

—farajali

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