The round was led by Bison Ventures and included participation from Innovation Endeavors and AI2 Incubator, which previously invested $650K in a pre-Seed round.
“We founded Cadstrom to address the reality that most electronics designs require several time-consuming revisions, and the problem is getting worse as electronics, AI, and connectivity becomes increasingly ubiquitous. Our vision is one where every engineer can achieve robust designs on their first build and get to market faster,” explained Margot Blouin, Founder and CEO of Cadstrom. “This funding represents a critical milestone for our team, and we’re excited to put the capital to work to further develop our automated verification tools that detect and address the most common issues that electrical engineers face.”
Founded in 2023 Cadstrom builds AI tools enabling electrical engineers to create devices that work correctly on their first attempt.
Core to Cadstrom’s approach is its proprietary Sigma Engine, which leverages a first principles understanding of physics, electronics, and generative AI to identify mistakes while automatically validating complex designs – it is said to cut development costs, accelerating GTM timeline, and shortening design cycles by up to 66% by eliminating respins.
With the demand for printed circuit boards (PCBs), which serve as the foundation for modern electronic products has grown substantially, PCBs have also become increasingly complex. Their design, however, has remained a largely manual process prone to errors and delays.
The average printed circuit board undergoes three “respins,” or reconfigurations of its design, due to unanticipated electrical design mistakes, requirements changes or other manufacturing realities - adding over $100K to development costs, which can delay a PCB’s production timeline by as much as six months.
This expense and delay are often further exacerbated by supply-chain issues and inconsistent component availability. Moreover, field failures and recalls cause severe damage to market confidence and product competitiveness.
Legacy verification tools are inconsistent, time-consuming and ineffective; electrical engineers say it’s inevitably faster and easier today to plan for respin iterations than waste time and effort attempting complete validation with the solutions currently on the market.
“Cadstrom’s approach is bringing unprecedented progress to the Testing, Inspection, and Certification market,” said Tom Biegala, Founding Partner at Bison Ventures. “The company has built a platform that is desperately needed by hardware engineers: by improving one of the most tedious parts of PCB development, Cadstrom helps engineers be more productive and bring validated hardware to market at remarkable speeds. This is in stark contrast to tools seeking to replace engineers with ineffective AI.”
Cadstrom said that it would use the new funds to expand its design and partner testing program, which currently includes several market-leading product development and design consulting agencies in the United States, with the goal of directly serving professional engineers.
