German startup Celus GmbH announced today it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding to help further its goal of using artificial intelligence to streamline printed circuit board development.

Today’s Series A round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and saw participation from DI Capital plus existing investors Speedinvest and Plug and Play.

As Celus explains, PCBs today are ubiquitous in every electronic product, be it a laptop, a coffee machine, a child’s toy radio-controlled car, washing machines — you name it. These circuit boards play an essential role in making our electronics work, and they typically contain hundreds if not thousands of tiny hardware components — and each one has its own specifications, capabilities, price tag and availability.

Piecing together all of these PCB components are teams of skilled engineers, and it is generally a painstaking, manual process. To design a circuit board from scratch, the first thing to do is to sketch out a basic diagram based on the specific components needed to power whatever product it will end up in. These components include transistors, capacitors, resistors, sensors, fuses, batteries and diodes.

The difficulty is that there are thousands of different ones to choose from, with varying sizes and specs, made by hundreds of manufacturers. So deciding which components to use and keeping in mind their capabilities, price and availability is an arduous task that often involves several highly skilled people perusing hundreds of different data sheets.

It’s only once the components have been selected that the engineers will then set about drawing a circuit diagram to link all of those components together into something that can power the final product. But even then, there can be problems: With the post-pandemic supply chain crunch, many PCB components can be hard to come by, which means finding alternatives and rethinking the design.

To make life easier, Celus has developed an AI-powered and cloud-based engineering platform that aims to automate much of the circuit board design process. It facilitates direct information flow between electronic component manufacturers and their customers.

Users simply describe their requirements, and then, by tapping into rich component data from hundreds of different sources, Celus can quickly identify the most suitable transistor, resistor or sensor, based on the demands of the product, budget and availability. In addition, it can generate conceptual drawings of how parts will connect, creating a kind of floor plan that shows where each component should be placed on the circuit board.

“With the chip and supply chain crisis, component sourcing entropy is at an all time high,” said analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “So the prospect of a cloud-based engineering offering, paired with a healthy dose of AI, has a shot at revolutionizing circuit design by substantially accelerating the development process.”

The company claims that its platform is able to reduce the time it takes to design new circuit boards by up to 90%. Thus, it believes it’s onto something big, pointing out that the global PCB industry is expected to generate around $75 billion in sales by 2027.

Celus has already made a big impression, with clients such as Siemens AG and Viessmann Group GmbH, a manufacturer of cooling and heating systems, and more than 1,800 engineers already using its platform.

The startup plans to use the cash from today’s funding round to scale its business and grow more, with a focus on expansion into the U.S. It will also expand its commercial teams and executive leadership.

Celus co-founder and Chief Executive Tobias Pohl said the company will open an office in the U.S. in order to position itself in the heart of the electronics industry. “We want to reach every electronics designer out there, enabling them to focus more time on innovation and creativity, while our software reduces the tedious and time-consuming tasks they were dealing with before,” he said.

Image: Celus