Electronics manufacturing has failed to keep up with the speed of hardware design, which now runs at software speed. Engineers working on anything hardware-related can now design far faster than they can actually manufacture. At the same time, and especially under pressure from the geopolitics associated with China, companies in hardware are trying to escape offshore supply chains. UK/US startup CircuitHub wants to compress that time from weeks to days and bring manufacturing closer to those companies.
It’s now raised $28 million Series A round to expand its automated electronics manufacturing platform. The entire round was taken by UK-based VC Plural. This will be used to grow CircuitHub’s automated factories across the US and Europe, expand its engineering team and push the company further into full-service electronics manufacturing.
Founded by Andrew Seddon (pictured), CircuitHub lets engineers upload circuit board design files online, receive an instant quote for anything from one to 10,000 units, pay by card and have finished printed circuit boards delivered in days.
“The big thing that we really sell is speed,” Seddon told the Pathfounders Podcast. “Traditionally in the industry, it takes about two to three weeks to get an assembled circuit board produced. And we’re able to do that in two to three days.”
CircuitHub’s first 5,000 sq ft “Grid” facility in Massachusetts uses robotics, computer vision, and AI to assemble boards, with a small on-site team overseeing quality. The company says it has delivered more than 2 million boards, placed more than 133 million parts and served 20,000 engineers.
Seddon argues the issue is not just speed, but industrial geography. “In the UK, we used to have a pretty strong electronics industry all through the 80s, 90s, and then going into the year 2000, it really dissipated. It all went over to Asia,” he said. “In the year 2000, there were about 2,000 PCB fabs in the US, and that is now down to under 100.”
That collapse has become newly relevant as governments and companies in the US and Europe try to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity. Supply chain shocks during Covid, trade tensions, import duties and concern over China dependency have all pushed the debate about electronics manufacturing back closer towards Western countries.
“We’re seeing a real renaissance in demand for domestic manufacturing,” Seddon said. For hardware startups, he added, the problem with manufacturing on the other side of the world is simple: “If you have a factory on the other side of the world, and you’re trying to rapidly innovate on your product design, that’s going to slow you down.”
CircuitHub is trying to solve that with shared, automated factories rather than asking every hardware company to build its own. “We offer this shared next-generation manufacturing facility that is way more advanced than anything else that you would typically see in the West,” Seddon said. “But you don’t have to build it yourself, you just get access to that as a hardware company.”
The company also sits neatly inside Plural’s broader hardware and deeptech thesis. Seddon said Plural already has a portfolio of companies in areas such as space, fusion and defence, all potential consumers of advanced manufacturing services.
While AI is making hardware design easier and faster, the physical aspects of assembling it all are being pressed to keep up. “I even think of the AI boom as a hardware boom,” he said. “If you look at where that capital is being exhausted out to, it’s all into physical infrastructure… data centres, which are chips on circuit boards.”
AI is also being used inside CircuitHub’s own factories. Seddon said the company now has more than 100 kilowatts of on-site compute running real-time inference next to its manufacturing system, using learned models to enable flexible production, reduce labour and cut error rates.
CircuitHub’s bet is that the next phase of hardware is unlikely to be won merely with better design tools, chips or AI, so much as making circuit boards dramatically faster and less dependent on distant global supply chains.
CircuitHub’s closest competing operating company is probably MacroFab, which raised $42m in growth financing in 2023, led by Foundry, with BMW i Ventures, Edison Partners and ATX Venture Partners participating. Another might Tempo Automation, which historically raised venture money from investors including Lux Capital, Uncork Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Dolby Family Ventures and others; and later went public via a SPAC.
