CircuitHub Inc., a company building automated manufacturing and assembly systems for electronics hardware at scale that supports industries such as self-driving cars and satellites, today announced it raised $28M led by Plural. 

Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub’s chief executive, founded the company on the premise that the electronics manufacturing market could be disrupted by the same hardware innovations that led to its creation: automation.  

He led the groundbreaking of the company’s first facility inspired by semiconductor fabs in Massachusetts, where robotics and artificial intelligence cut, prime and assemble printed circuit boards. The factory, known colloquially as the Grid, sits in a 5,000-square-foot space and uses computer vision and AI to build electronics and ship them to teams around the world. 

By automating large parts of the manufacturing process, the Grid can produce and prototype a single prototype or up to 10,000 units across dozens of different designs simultaneously. It allows the company to cut production time from weeks to days and makes mass production in smaller quantities economically viable. 

The ubiquity of the circuit board 

Printed circuit boards, or PCBs, are everywhere. When many people think of “electronics,” they often picture a PCB: a green fiberglass square with gold lines painted on it and a few bulbous components sticking off it. Break open a keyboard or a mouse — or even a smartphone — and there will be a PCB holding its guts together. The buttons and plastic molding are a shiny shell designed to protect the insides, give it structure and make it functional. 

According to CircuitHub, most electronics projects involve fewer than 10,000 units. However, the industry is still geared towards mass production – this burden means that innovating around PCBs can become extremely costly, especially in niche markets where the most focused or critical designs aren’t mass produced. 

“Today, hardware companies face a tough choice: either spin up their own vertically integrated manufacturing from scratch, or rely on a legacy Western supply chain that’s been decaying for years,” said Seddon. “CircuitHub is the alternative: providing remote access to a cutting-edge factory through your browser or your AI agent.” 

The Asia-Pacific region, and China in particular, holds the lion’s share of manufacturing capability for PCBs and electronics. According to Grand View Research, Asia-Pacific represented almost 45% of the market and CircuitHub added that the United States has lost most of its capability to the lower-cost markets overseas. 

In response to recent supply chain fragility and macroeconomic shifts, the U.S. and European governments and companies have pushed to rebuild domestic manufacturing capabilities.  

The advent of generative AI has also made it easier than ever before to design and iterate on circuit board prototype designs. Getting them to market becomes a bottleneck when manufacturing isn’t print-on-demand, or necessity means building a market first with hundreds of thousands of customers (or more) to buy into the first version before iterating onto the next design.  

This requires vast sums of capital and pushes out small startups from taking advantage of designing and innovating hardware at software speed, something AI agents promised to bring to the industry. After all, numerous startups have already entered the industry, giving hardware engineers AI tools to automate the development and design of PCBs, including Celus GmbH and Flux.

With its manufacturing facility capable of rolling out multiple designs at once, efficiently at lower volume based on AI designs, CircuitHub said it’s aiming directly at shoring up this gap in the industry. The potential customer base is already present and growing. 

The company said the new funding will accelerate the expansion of the company’s automated factories across Europe and the U.S. It also intends to take the “Grid” model and make the original AI-led manufacturing and assembly capability more modular so that it can handle increasing capacity wherever it is deployed. 

Since launching its first production facility, CircuitHub says it has delivered over 2 million boards and placed over 133 million parts for more than 20,000 engineers across some of the world’s biggest hardware teams. 

Photo: Pixabay