electronics
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WelComm sells the “so what” behind the specification
The San Diego agency speaks fluent engineering. Its business is turning complicated electronics into stories that the people buying them have a reason to read.
MotionLab.Berlin gives hardware startups room to make a mess
A €1,500 double-decker bus helped give this Berlin workshop its personality. Shared machinery, paid memberships and publicly backed programs explain how it helps hardware founders get to work.
EML changed its name. Then it changed who owned it.
The electronics PR specialist became Wildfire, traded press-cutting piles for campaigns with commercial aims, and put the business into employee ownership. Its history is a lesson in knowing what to keep.
The Chilean Immigrant Who Turned One Whittier Furniture Store Into a SoCal Home Empire
Daniel Rosenberg landed in Los Angeles from Chile in 1989 with entrepreneurial mileage and not much else. Three decades later his family runs a furniture-to-refrigerators retailer that quietly out-locals the national chains across Orange County.
PDF Solutions
PDF Solutions is a Santa Clara semiconductor analytics company that turns the firehose of chip-manufacturing and test data into decisions. Its Exensio platform connects fabs, foundries, OSATs and fabless designers, normalizing data across silos so customers can ramp yield faster, catch defects earlier and run AI/ML models on the factory floor. Founded in 1991 and public since 2001 (Nasdaq: PDFS), it serves 130+ semiconductor companies including TSMC, Intel, Qualcomm, Analog Devices and DENSO.
Flux
Flux is a browser-based, AI-native hardware design platform that turns text prompts into manufacturable printed circuit boards. The San Francisco company calls its product an 'AI Hardware Engineer' and is rewriting how electronics get designed by combining an electronic CAD environment with an agentic copilot that researches parts, draws schematics, lays out boards, and prepares files for fabrication.
Make:
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
UnitX
UnitX builds AI-powered visual inspection systems for manufacturers who can't afford to ship defective products. Their flagship platform - combining OptiX (software-defined imaging), CorteX (AI edge computing), GenX (synthetic defect generation), and FleX (the full integrated system) - cuts defect escape rates by 9x and deploys in about a week. With 820+ systems running across 170+ factories globally, UnitX has inspected over $6.1 billion worth of goods and counts five of the world's top ten automotive tier-1 suppliers among its customers.