The Right Approach: The Top 5 Scariest Things About AI in PCB Fabrication
Punching Out: How Are the Big Boys Doing Now?
It’s Only Common Sense: Every Salesperson Must Become a Teacher
Circuit Mind, the AI platform that enables enterprise electronics teams to automatically design, verify, and optimize circuit boards, announced $25 million in new financing, bringing its total funding to $33.4 million. The financing includes an $18.5 million Series A led by Norwest, with participation from existing investors Third Prime, Differential, and Blackhorn, and new investor Lightscape VC, as well as the previously unannounced seed round led by Third Prime. As part of the Series A, Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest, will join Circuit Mind’s board of directors.
The funding will expand Circuit Mind's platform across the full electronics design lifecycle, grow its sales, engineering and customer success teams, and establish a U.S. headquarters to serve the North American market. Electronic engineering teams at Emerson, Schneider Electric and Fortune 5 companies are already working with Circuit Mind to cut design time from months to weeks, reduce bill of materials cost by 25%, and prevent respins that can cause 1+ month delays.
"Software teams are shipping 100 times faster with AI, but electronics design hasn't changed in 40 years," said Tomide Adesanmi, co-founder and CEO of Circuit Mind. "Circuit Mind is bringing to electronic engineering what Cursor, Claude Code, and Cognition have brought to software engineering: AI workflows that professional engineers can rely on. This funding allows us to bring that capability to more engineering teams and accelerate the shift toward Electronic Design Intelligence."
“Electronics design is one of the most complex and consequential engineering workflows, yet much of the process remains manual and time-consuming,” said Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest. “Circuit Mind combines AI with physics-based models to fundamentally improve how engineers design electronics. With deep industry expertise and technical vision, Tomide and Basilio are uniquely positioned to lead this emerging category.”
Electronics Design Hasn't Changed in Decades
They spend their time selecting hundreds of components from millions of options, manually reading thousands-of-pages datasheets, running simulations, drawing schematics, and placing and routing components on a size-constrained printed circuit board. The inevitable errors are only caught when boards are physically manufactured and tested, adding months and multiple iterations to the development cycle.
General-purpose LLMs haven’t been trained on professionally designed circuits, don’t have access to leading organizations’ learned engineering context, and struggle to achieve the accuracy required to accelerate a process where “99%” right means months of delay.
This is what Circuit Mind was built for.
Circuit Mind's Electronic Design Intelligence Platform: ACE and AVE
Circuit Mind's electronics design intelligence platform gives professional hardware teams AI they can trust to design complex electronic systems. It combines agentic AI with Circuit Mind's patented, physics-based decision engine, structured machine-readable models of electronic components, and each customer's own engineering context, including approved manufacturers, preferred parts, and design rules. The platform integrates with the ECAD tools, libraries, PLMs and engineering environments teams already use, ensuring practical use of AI in current enterprise workflows.
Today, two applications run on the platform.
- ACE (Assistant to Circuit Engineers) turns a hardware block diagram into a schematic, bill of materials, and supporting analysis in minutes, while generating design options optimized for cost, size, power, or supply chain availability. Its patented, physics-based design decision intelligence evaluates options within physics and electrical constraints, helping engineers arrive at functional designs with provable accuracy.
- AVE (Agentic Verification Engine), launching today, uses AI agents to verify designs against component datasheets and an organization's own design rules, helping surface issues that conventional schematic review processes may not catch before a prototype is built and reducing costly manufacturing respins.
In a peer-reviewed case study, engineers from Los Alamos National Laboratory used Circuit Mind to complete in four hours an electronics design that would have taken two weeks.
“At Schneider Electric, we see AI as a way to amplify engineering expertise and accelerate innovation,” says Daniel GHENO, SVP Innovation and Technology and CTO Energy Management at Schneider Electric. “Our collaboration with Circuit Mind demonstrates how AI can help engineers rapidly explore, compare, and optimize electronic architectures while leveraging company standards and reusable design knowledge. Early evaluations indicate the potential to reduce architecture exploration effort by more than 90%, enabling teams to focus more time on innovation, engineering judgment, and product differentiation.”
