Most software in the world runs on general-purpose chips. CPUs, for example, are built to run almost any program you hand them. But that flexibility comes at a cost: power efficiency, latency, and raw computing power all suffer.

When a workload demands more than a CPU can deliver, teams increasingly turn to custom silicon, also known as an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, designed to do one job exceptionally well. A well-designed ASIC will be +100x more performant than a CPU. The catch is that ASICs are brutal to build: they require specialized expertise, cost a fortune to produce, and can’t be changed once they ship.

Enter Mihailo Isakov. A lifelong AI researcher, Mihailo took the road less traveled and earned a PhD in chip design. Living at the intersection of those two fields, he kept returning to the same conviction: there had to be a way to give people the performance of an ASIC without the cost and the pain.

That conviction became BoolSi, a platform that compiles the hotspots in your code directly into hardware. You mark a hot function in your embedded C or C++, and BoolSi synthesizes it into a custom co-processor built for that exact workload. It handles the full path to deployment, too: mapping API calls to the function signature, updating the BSP, and producing the hardware bitstream. The output is a build artifact. No HDL or chip-design team, and every generated accelerator is formally verified against your source before it runs.

The performance speaks for itself. In one benchmark of a 10,000-line C regex library, BoolSi identified the hotspots and offloaded them to hardware logic, turning a 2.66 ms task into a 0.042 ms one. That’s a 63x speedup, and the gains scale almost linearly as more hotspots are converted.

BoolSi is starting where the stakes are highest: embedded systems like drones, robots, and defense, where every microsecond and power watt show up in the product. Over time, the platform will move up and down the compute stack to serve a far broader range of applications.

We’re thrilled to be partnering with the Fine Structure team in backing Mihailo and BoolSi as they make custom hardware as easy as writing software.