ChipMango, the California-headquartered semiconductor tech company that designs chips and trains engineers, has closed a $1.9 million seed round to expand its commercial engineering work and workforce development platform across Africa and other markets. Atlantica Ventures, an Africa-focused impact venture capital fund, led the round, with participation from DFS Labs, Kaleo Ventures, Madica, Trilinear Technologies, Malta Ventures and other investors.
Africa contributes less than 1% to the global semiconductor market, with much of the industry’s design and manufacturing capacity concentrated in the United States, Europe and Asia. ChipMango is betting that Africa can capture a bigger share of the industry by starting with one of its biggest needs: engineering talent.
ChipMango said it will use the funding to expand its engineering and product-development capacity, support new commercial design engagements, scale its AI-native learning and workforce platform, and develop its edge-AI and intelligent-sensor technologies. The company added that it will grow operations across Africa, the United States, and Europe. “The next era of AI will not be defined by software alone,” said Ola Fadiran, ChipMango’s cofounder and chief executive.
“It will depend on who can design the chips, systems and intelligent hardware that power it. ChipMango is expanding access to those capabilities so more regions can help build the technologies shaping the future.” Founded in 2022 by Fadiran and Jovan Andjelich, ChipMango operates across two connected parts of the semiconductor value chain: developing engineers with chip-design skills and deploying those engineers on commercial semiconductor design projects.
The company does not manufacture chips; instead, it focuses on the design and verification stages that happen before a design is sent to a fabrication plant for production. Its workforce platform gives learners browser-based access to professional semiconductor design environments, intelligent learning support, and electronic design automation (EDA) tools, the company said. ChipMango noted that