2026 Outlook with Badru Agarwala of Rise Design Automation (RDA)

Badru Agarwala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rise Design Automation (RDA). With a strong track record of 40 years in EDA, he was previously the General Manager of the Calypto Systems Division at Mentor Graphics, now Siemens EDA.  He advanced High-Level Synthesis with Catapult and drove innovations in high-level verification and power optimization.

Tell us a little bit about your company. 

RDA is an EDA startup founded by industry veterans with more than 30 years of experience each in hardware design and EDA. We are focused on fundamentally changing how hardware is designed today—supercharging productivity and design quality by raising the level of hardware abstraction, closing the gap between systems and silicon, and deploying agentic AI that operates in real, production design workflows now.

What was the most exciting high point of 2025 for your company? 

The most exciting high point of 2025 was our direct engagement with customers and the feedback we received from real production designs at Tier-1 semiconductor companies. While we believed we had built a differentiated product and architecture, seeing it validated on real silicon by practicing engineers—and delivering measurable results—was a defining moment for the company.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2025? 

The biggest challenge we faced in 2025 was overcoming the long-standing barriers and perceptions that have limited industry-wide adoption of higher-level hardware abstraction and High-Level Synthesis. In practice, this meant supporting diverse design styles, delivering predictable out-of-the-box QoR comparable to hand-coded RTL, establishing robust verification and debug workflows, and providing a clear path for new users to become productive quickly.

How is your company’s work addressing this challenge?  

RDA takes a platform-first approach to High-Level Synthesis: not an incremental point tool, but an integrated system that combines core HLS technology with a production ecosystem of IP and automation. A key part of this is an agent-based, tool-using workflow that helps engineers generate and refine designs by iterating on synthesis and verification results, guided by measured QoR metrics. Customer engagements in 2025 have demonstrated that these barriers can be overcome on real designs, with predictable QoR and workflows that scale beyond expert users.

Are you incorporating AI into your products?

Yes. We treat the LLM as a modular component. Correctness and progress are driven by tool feedback grounded in compile or elaboration, synthesis and verification, and by measured QoR and constraint metrics, rather than being tied to any single LLM or orchestration stack. Engineers describe intent and constraints, AI proposes candidates, Rise tools executes and measure, and AI selects and refines based on the results. We also use reinforcement learning for architectural exploration, optimizing choices against the same QoR and constraint metrics. Once design intent is raised above RTL, today’s natural-language models become practical and effective for design and IP generation and architectural tradeoff exploration.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2026 will be, and why?

In 2026, we expect our primary growth to come from expanding customer deployments of our core technology, building on the validation achieved in 2025. With proven quality and productivity on real designs, we see clear opportunities to extend the platform’s value in critical directions that our customers are asking for. This includes enhancing the power and deployment flexibility of our agentic AI capabilities, as well as leveraging our architecture to more tightly bridge system-level design and silicon through architectural exploration and virtual platform workflows.

What conferences did you attend in 2025 and how was the traffic?

In 2025, we attended both DVCon and DAC, which were our first conferences after emerging from stealth. Traffic at both events was strong, and we had many productive conversations with attendees.

Will you participate in conferences in 2025? Same or more as 2025?

Our current plan is to attend both DVCon and DAC again in 2026, and we are evaluating the possibility of adding additional conferences as we continue to grow.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

Customers typically engage with us directly to explore next steps. In addition, starting in January 2026, customers can also work with our new North America distributor, AI Tech Sales, which we are excited to partner with as we expand our reach.

Contact RDA

Also Read:

Reimagining Architectural Exploration in the Age of AI

Rise Design Automation Webinar: SystemVerilog at the Core: Scalable Verification and Debug in HLS

Moving Beyond RTL at #62DAC