The Story

From a prompt to a PCB - inside the company rewriting hardware design

There is a corner of the technology world where the rules of software have never applied. Circuit board design - the unglamorous, necessary art of laying out the copper traces and components that make everything electronic work - has operated on the same paradigms for decades. Desktop software. Proprietary formats. Steep learning curves that kept hardware development locked inside a small guild of specialists. Kamran Maniar is at the helm of the company that is ending that era.

At Flux, Maniar leads an AI-powered electronics design platform that has crossed a million registered users and hosted the design of nearly 6.5 million devices - all built around a simple, radical premise: if you can describe what you want to build, the AI can help you build it. No desktop install. No $10,000 software license. Just a browser and an idea.

The February 2026 Series B - $27 million led by 8VC, with Bain Capital Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Outsiders Fund continuing their backing - was not just a funding round. It was a statement about where the hardware industry is going. Francisco Gimenez at 8VC, who first backed Flux back in 2019, called it plainly: the hardware design stack is being rebuilt from scratch, and Flux holds the blueprint.

"With Flux, you can have a brilliant idea one day and hold the finished product within weeks."

Flux team on the platform's vision

That is the gap Maniar's company is closing. The journey from an electronics idea to a manufactured, functional PCB has historically required teams, months, and budgets that shut out independent inventors, small hardware studios, and the enormous category of people who simply had no path to learning the tools. Flux changes the calculus. Natural language inputs feed AI agents that handle planning, schematic generation, component sourcing, and layout optimization - each step explainable, reviewable, reversible. The engineer stays in control. The AI does the grunt work.

Maniar brings a perspective shaped by two cities at once. Rooted in Karachi - a metropolis of engineers, makers, and builders - and operating at the center of gravity in San Francisco, he leads a team of 110 people working to collapse the gap between imagination and fabrication. The company's tech stack reads like a blueprint for how modern AI products are built: LangGraph for agentic workflows, React and TypeScript for the frontend, Node.js on the backend, Google Cloud and AWS for infrastructure, Pulumi for infrastructure-as-code, Figma for design. It is a serious engineering organization doing serious work on a problem that most people outside electronics circles did not know was this large.