LinkedIn · Jul 2026
Partcl announced the winners of its macro placement challenge with Hudson River Trading, saying the competition drew 223 registrations and 132 verified eligible submissions.
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Jul 29, 2026
Overview
Partcl is a San Francisco-based, YC-backed startup building GPU-accelerated EDA tools for chip design. Its public products focus on RTL optimization, physical-design acceleration, and a high-performance design database, with the goal of cutting chip-design feedback from hours/days to seconds/minutes.
Primary product
GPU-accelerated EDA platform for chip design optimization (RTL Super Optimization, Boson, and Nucleus)
Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Sub-industry
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) / semiconductor software
Offices
San Francisco, California, United States (HQ)
Business model
B2B software
developer tools
Funding
People & investors
Work & culture
Small, highly technical, research-heavy startup culture centered on hard optimization and systems problems. Public activity suggests a bias toward open technical challenges, rapid iteration, and community engagement in chip-design research.
Compensation
Public SF job posts list $130K-$300K base salary ranges. The Backend EDA Compiler Engineer role advertises 0.10%-1.00% equity, and the Founding Engineer (Systems + ML) role advertises 0.50%-2.00% equity. Both roles are open to new grads.
Product & market
Differentiators
- —GPU-native acceleration
- —physics-informed models
- —700x-1000x faster feedback claims than legacy tools
- —end-to-end flow from RTL optimization through physical design
- —seconds/minutes instead of hours/days
Technology
Python
Apache
LLVM
SystemVerilog
Verilog
GitHub
PyTorch
CUDA
C
Customers
chip designers
ASIC physical-design teams
AI accelerator teams
embedded/IoT teams
mobile SoC teams
Competitors
Cadence
Synopsys
Siemens EDA
OpenROAD / open-source EDA tooling
Scale & contact
Latest news
Substack · Jun 2026
A technical write-up of the winning approach for the challenge; it discusses the benchmark setup, proxy cost scoring, and the verified rank-1 result.
LinkedIn · Apr 2026
Founder/CEO William Salcedo announced that Partcl raised $5M led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from several investors including 468 Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Transpose Platform, Pioneer Fund, Tekedia Capital, Founders Capital, Paul Graham, and Y Combinator.
LinkedIn · Mar 2026
Partcl announced an open competition with Hudson River Trading to build better macro placement algorithms, with prizes and a public benchmark-driven evaluation process.
Fondo · Feb 2026
Launch coverage describing Partcl’s GPU-accelerated EDA approach, founders, product claims, and target use cases for AI accelerators, embedded/IoT, and mobile SoCs.
Jobs and careers at Partcl
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