Software-defined test and measurement startup Liquid Instruments Pty. Ltd. today launched GenInst Studio, software that turns a plain-language description into a custom, ready-to-run test instrument on the company’s reconfigurable Moku hardware.

GenInst Studio takes the request through a chat interface and hands back a validated, application-specific instrument, with no field-programmable gate array code for the user to write. Work that used to demand specialist FPGA skills and months of effort can now happen in one session, according to the company.

That pitch takes on a long-running bind in test and measurement. Off-the-shelf instruments seldom fit an experiment’s exact requirements and rolling a custom rig has meant paying for niche expertise and waiting. GenInst Studio leans on an agentic artificial intelligence workflow that carries a user from specification to a deployed instrument. Liquid Instruments says the workflow stays auditable, so a user can follow its reasoning instead of trusting a black box.

The firm has been at this since 2014, working out of San Diego and Canberra, Australia. Moku, its hardware line, does the job of a full rack of bench instruments in one reconfigurable unit. Underneath sit FPGAs and a software layer that can recast the device as a signal generator, a custom trigger, or a hardware-accelerated digital signal processing engine, depending on what the user loads.

Moku users can get GenInst Studio now.

The launch follows the $50 million Series C round Liquid Instruments closed in April, co-led by Keysight Technologies Inc. and the Australian government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation. That round came with a side deal for the two companies to develop AI-driven instrumentation together. Its user base numbers in the thousands and the customer roster includes the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Stanford University and several U.S. defense companies.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Daniel Shaddock said pairing agentic AI with reconfigurable hardware lets an engineer “build exactly the instrument you need, simply by describing what you want,” a capability he said the industry “has never seen before.”

Among the early users is Apex Photonics, whose Chief Technology Officer Grady Koch has built FPGA-based systems for decades. He said GenInst Studio gets engineers to a working prototype without the deep FPGA expertise the job usually demands. The company’s German distributor, SI Scientific Instruments GmbH, weighed in too, with managing director Maximilian Dreher saying the tool lowers the barrier to adopting and customizing advanced instrumentation.

The new funding pushed Liquid Instruments’ total raised past $100 million.

Photo: Liquid Instruments