$4.5M to Catch Fake Chips Without Destroying Them | Chiplytics, Sandia & TACFI | Product-X

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Before a chip goes into a fighter radar, a satellite power module or an automotive controller, how do you know it wasn't pulled from an old circuit board, sanded down and re-marked as new? The checks that give direct evidence open the package or stress the part, so the chip can't be shipped afterwards. Buyers end up testing a sample and living with whatever stays in the untested pile.

Chiplytics wants to measure a chip and leave it usable. The company announced $4.5 million in new funding, co-led by Scout Ventures and Waypoint Ventures, with QKSS, Industrious Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, the Seattle Alliance of Angels and Cornell's Red Bear Angels participating; the financing also includes a U.S. Air Force Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) award. Its electrical testing technology comes from Sandia National Laboratories. Chiplytics was co-founded by CEO Steven Dourmashkin and President Stephen DiBartolomeo.

In this episode:

• Vivian Liu (veteran angel investor) on what the $4.5M is buying: demand created by procurement rules, the Sandia license, the TACFI award, and the revenue questions that decide whether this is a business: per-part testing vs software vs licensing the fingerprint library, cost and time per chip, lab capacity, and who pays.
• Nolan (ex-Big Tech CTO) on how a non-destructive test can work: probe-station measurements of capacitance, inductance, junction I-V behavior and high-frequency scattering, optical inspection for sanding and re-marking, golden samples, and scoring how far a part sits from normal. Plus where it fails: shifting baselines across lots, anomalies without a cause, threshold trade-offs, and tampering that leaves no electrical trace.
• Where a moat could come from when the statistics are public: the reference library, accreditation and acceptance by procurement teams, and a record of resolved cases.
• Four things to watch: independent blind-test recall, false alarms across lots, the cost of adding new part types, and the revenue mix.

The "above 99% accuracy" figure in company materials is a company claim; we did not find it in the funding release or on chiplytics.com.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 When verifying a chip destroys it, all you can do is sample

01:48 The investment case: demand created by regulation

04:10 The technical mechanism: from how a chip looks to how it behaves electrically

07:59 Commercial defensibility: the method is public; the library, credentials and loop are not

10:41 Conclusion: four verifiable tests

Sources

Funding announcement (Business Wire, Oct 6, 2026); Dealroom company profile; chiplytics.com; U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report on counterfeit electronic parts (2012).