# Sergiy Nesterenko

> Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who spent five years on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy electronics, he watched one of his first boards literally burn up in his hands and decided manual PCB layout was a problem worth a decade. Quilter trains its system on physics and constraints rather than copying human designers, and in 2025 it produced the world's first fully functional computer laid out by AI.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Quilter
- **Organizations:** Quilter, SpaceX, UC Berkeley
- **From:** Ukraine
- **Nationality:** Ukrainian-American
- **Education:** Triple major in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, University of California, Berkeley
- **Known for:** Founded and leads Quilter, a pioneer of fully autonomous AI PCB design, Raised $40M total from Benchmark, Index Ventures, Coatue, Root Ventures, and angels including Lip-Bu Tan, Led Project Speedrun: a single engineer took a complex computer from schematic to manufacturing-ready in under a week, an 11x acceleration

## Career timeline

- **~1991** — Born in Ukraine, three months before the collapse of the Soviet Union
- **~2001** — Immigrated to the United States at age 10 without speaking English
- **college** — Triple-majored in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at UC Berkeley
- **SpaceX (5 years)** — Developed radiation-hardened avionics for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy second stage; built an ultra-wideband RF positioning system with sub-centimeter accuracy
- **2019** — Founded Quilter to automate PCB layout using physics-driven reinforcement learning
- **2023** — Quilter raised $10M led by Benchmark to build an AI 'compiler' for circuit boards
- **2025-10** — Quilter raised a $25M Series B led by Index Ventures, bringing total funding to $40M
- **2025-12** — Unveiled Project Speedrun - the world's first fully functional computer designed by AI

## Achievements

- Founded and leads Quilter, a pioneer of fully autonomous AI PCB design
- Raised $40M total from Benchmark, Index Ventures, Coatue, Root Ventures, and angels including Lip-Bu Tan
- Led Project Speedrun: a single engineer took a complex computer from schematic to manufacturing-ready in under a week, an 11x acceleration
- Built an ultra-wideband RF positioning system with sub-centimeter accuracy at SpaceX
- Developed radiation-hardened avionics for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy at SpaceX

## Latest updates

- **2025-10** — Quilter closed a $25M Series B led by Index Ventures, with Nina Achadjian joining the board; total funding reached $40M.
- **2025-12** — Quilter unveiled Project Speedrun, the world's first fully functional computer designed by AI, with 98% of placement, routing and physics validation completed autonomously in 27 hours.

## Links

- Website: https://quilter.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/sergiy-nesterenko
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-05