In an era when a tiny sliver of silicon can decide whether a hospital ventilator keeps working, whether a car brakes in time, or whether a military drone completes its mission, a Seattle startup is quietly building a high-tech shield for one of the most fragile links in modern life. On October 6, 2026, Chiplytics announced that it had raised $4.5 million in new funding and opened a dedicated inspection facility in Bellport, New York. The company’s mission sounds straightforward but is deceptively difficult: make sure that the semiconductor chips and critical electronic components embedded in the world’s machines are exactly what they claim to be. With a combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, and rigorous testing, Chiplytics screens electronics for counterfeits, substitutions, inconsistencies, and suspicious parts before they are assembled into the systems we all depend on. The funding round includes $2.5 million in seed financing and a $2 million Air Force Tactical Funding Increase award, and it was led by Scout Ventures and Waypoint Ventures. The announcement marks a major step for a company that started only a few years ago, born out of a global crisis, shaped by national security experience, and now positioning itself as an essential checkpoint in the electronics supply chain.
The story of Chiplytics begins with a problem most people never think about: even before a chip makes it into a product, there is an entire shadowy supply chain that can put fake or flawed parts into circulation. The company launched in 2022, during the COVID-driven chip shortage, when manufacturers across the world were desperate to keep their production lines moving. Factories that had always bought components through official channels suddenly found themselves waiting for months, sometimes more than a year, for basic parts. “We’re seeing a lot of lead times now over 52 weeks for basic components,” said Stephen DiBartolomeo, president and co-founder of Chiplytics. That kind of delay is an eternity in an industry where speed is everything. Manufacturers were left with two options: they could wait for parts from authorized distributors, or they could turn to independent brokers and distributors who claimed to have stock but were not authorized by the original makers to sell it. The second path is faster, but it is also risky. Bad actors in the electronics market have long known that counterfeiters can re-label old or low-grade chips, disguise components as more expensive ones, or sell off defective parts from scrap bins. With lead times stretched to the breaking point, the temptation to look the other way grew stronger. Meanwhile, the AI boom has created new bottlenecks of its own, with companies scrambling for the advanced chips that power large language models, autonomous systems, and data centers. Every new wave of demand creates new opportunities for fraud, and every fraudulent component that slips through is a potential disaster. A single bad chip can take down an entire system, and in applications like avionics, medical equipment, or national defense, the cost of failure is not just financial—it can be measured in lost trust, lost missions, and even lost lives.
Chiplytics’ answer to this problem is a verification platform that is strikingly different from the way electronics testing has traditionally been done. In many cases, manufacturers and inspection agencies rely on sampling: they pull a handful of components from a large batch, test those few, and hope that the rest are good. That approach can work for some things, but it leaves enormous gaps. If a counterfeit or flawed part happens to sit outside the sample, it sails through. Chiplytics decided to flip the model. Instead of testing a few, they test everything. Their technology combines artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics to screen every single electronics item in a shipment, checking each part for quality and authenticity rather than leaving anyone to wonder about the untested majority. DiBartolomeo offered a vivid example of why that matters: “We just did an order for 50,000 parts. If you were to try and do that by hand or by sampling, it would take way too long.” With the platform Chiplytics has built, thousands of components can be examined in a controlled, repeatable, automated process. The system is designed to detect counterfeits and substitutions, to catch inconsistencies between what a component says on its label and what it actually is, and to flag suspect parts before they ever enter a manufacturing assembly line. It is, in effect, an interrogation room for microchips—except it never sleeps, never cuts corners, and never feels pressure to approve a shipment just because a production deadline is looming. For manufacturers that have been burned by bad parts, or for defense contractors who simply cannot afford to be wrong, this kind of detailed screening is not a luxury. It is becoming a necessity.
The company’s origins are rooted in the unusual combination of high-level national security expertise and hands-on entrepreneurial grit. Chiplytics got its start through a U.S. Department of Energy program that connects entrepreneurs with technology developed in national laboratories and helps them turn that technology into commercial products. The team worked side by side with experts at Sandia National Laboratories to develop its verification platform, and before ever offering it to the open market, the company validated its solution with the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. That gives Chiplytics an unusual level of credibility: this is not a technology that was dreamed up in a garage and fired into the market with a wish and a prayer. It was tested under the rigorous standards of the American military. The leadership behind the company reflects that same blend of backgrounds. DiBartolomeo and CEO and co-founder Steven Dourmashkin first knew each other from high school on Long Island, New York. DiBartolomeo attended the U.S. Naval Academy and later worked as a cryptologic warfare officer with the National Security Agency, serving in the secretive world of signals intelligence and national security. Dourmashkin took a different route. He earned degrees in mechanical engineering, went on to launch a music technology company, and eventually sold it. For years, their paths seemed to be heading in different directions. But the two reconnected with a shared ambition to build a business at the intersection of hardware and national security. They brought on Chief Technology Officer Connor Dempsey, an expert in semiconductor physics whom Dourmashkin knew from Cornell University. Together, the founding team brought together the unlikely worlds of intelligence operations, entrepreneurship, and hardcore engineering. It is exactly the kind of team you would want if you were trying to solve a problem that involves both physics and trust.
Today, Chiplytics remains a lean, focused operation. The startup has six full-time employees, supported by a network of contractors, and its research and development operations are based in Seattle. The company’s presence in Seattle connects it to the Pacific Northwest’s deep pool of engineering talent, while its roots on Long Island came full circle with the opening of the new inspection lab in Bellport, New York. The lab is situated inside a massive 600,000-square-foot center operated by Quality King, one of the country’s major distribution companies. Chiplytics will support Quality King’s QK Special Services division, which focuses on electronics. The physical location matters in a way that is easy to overlook. The fight against counterfeit electronics is not just a matter of clever algorithms and robotics; it is also a logistics challenge. You need to be close to the flow of parts, embedded in the distribution ecosystem, and able to process shipments quickly and efficiently. By placing its inspection capabilities directly within a major distribution hub, Chiplytics can serve as a checkpoint between the global supply chain and the manufacturers who need to know what they are actually buying. The company’s small team is a reminder that transformative technology does not require a giant corporate bureaucracy. It requires a clear-eyed understanding of the problem, a strong partnership with institutions that care about quality, and the kind of agility that allows new ideas to move from concept to deployment without getting tangled in red tape.
The new funding will allow Chiplytics to expand its deployment, scale its operations, and likely build on the momentum that has already carried it from the Department of Energy to Sandia National Laboratories, from validation with the U.S. military to commercial work in the private sector. In addition to the leadership of Scout Ventures and Waypoint Ventures, the round includes investments from QKSS, Industrious Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, Seattle Alliance of Angels, and Cornell University’s Red Bear Angels. The participation of Cornell’s investor network is fitting, given the founders’ connection to the university, and the support of defense-oriented funds highlights how serious the threat of counterfeit electronics has become. The story of Chiplytics is, at its heart, a story about trust. We live in a world where we rely on invisible networks of tiny components to keep our planes in the air, our hospitals running, our power grids stable, and our soldiers safe. Yet we rarely stop to consider where those components came from, whether they passed through good hands or bad ones, or whether they carry within them some hidden flaw that could bring everything crashing down. Chiplytics is trying to replace uncertainty with confidence. With every shipment that passes through its systems, the company is building a more honest picture of the electronics supply chain—one where authenticity is not assumed, but proven. And from its R&D base in Seattle to its new inspection facility in New York, this small but determined startup is showing that sometimes the most important work is the work that goes unnoticed, ensuring that the machines we trust are built on foundations we can actually rely on.
