hardware-design
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BaseFrame
BaseFrame is a San Francisco AI startup from Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, founded by UC Berkeley classmates Anshul Paul and Vaibhav Agrawal. The company has iterated quickly across the AI stack - launching first as an AI copilot that catches hardware design flaws before boards are built, then as a desktop app that scans a team's own work history to find what AI can automate, and most recently pivoting to Clam, a 'Semantic Firewall' that adds enterprise-grade security around broad-access AI agents. Across all three, the thread is the same: make powerful AI safe, useful, and grounded in real work.
Haltian
Haltian is a Finnish IoT company from Oulu that turns physical spaces into smart, sustainable environments. Founded in 2012 by former Nokia product engineers, it pairs its Thingsee wireless sensor hardware with the Empathic Building digital twin software to help offices, hospitals, warehouses and logistics sites measure occupancy, air quality and asset location - and act on the data. Having earned early fame designing the Oura smart ring, Haltian now runs one of Europe's largest IoT deployments and serves roughly 400 customers across 36 countries.
P-1 AI
P-1 AI is a deep-tech startup building engineering AGI for the physical world. Its product, an anthropomorphized AI engineer agent named Archie, is trained on proprietary semi-synthetic, physics-based datasets to reason across multiphysics design problems and use the same complex engineering tools human engineers use. Currently operating at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, Archie is already working with design partners on data center cooling and critical power systems, with expansion planned into automotive, aerospace, and defense. Founded by former Airbus and United Technologies CTO Paul Eremenko alongside Google DeepMind and Airbus veterans, the company raised a $23M seed round in 2025 led by Radical Ventures.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
AllSpice.io
AllSpice.io is a Boston-based hardware development platform that brings software-style workflows - version control, automated design reviews, visual diffs, and CI/CD - to electronics and PCB engineering. Founded in 2019 by Valentina Ratner and Kyle Dumont, the company connects native ECAD tools so hardware teams can catch errors early, collaborate asynchronously, and ship reliable designs with full traceability. Its AI agent, DRCY, flags issues like misconfigured pins, swapped TX/RX lines, and missing capacitors before they reach production. Customers range from startups to Fortune 500s across aerospace, robotics, defense, autonomous vehicles, and medical devices.
Duncan Haldane
Duncan Haldane is the co-founder and CEO of JITX, a Berkeley-born startup that lets electrical engineers design circuit boards by writing code instead of dragging lines on a screen. Before software, he built robots: at UC Berkeley he created two Guinness World Record machines - the X2-VelociRoACH, the fastest robot relative to its size, and Salto, the most vertically agile jumping robot ever built. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and started JITX in 2017 because he wanted a faster way to design the hardware inside his robots.
Hardik Kabaria
Hardik Kabaria is Co-Founder and CEO of Vinci4D.ai (now getvinci.ai), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a physics foundation model that makes hardware simulation 1000x faster than traditional finite element analysis. A Stanford PhD in Mechanics and Computation, he spent eight years at Carbon - the 3D printing unicorn - rising from software engineer to CXO before founding Vinci in 2023. His company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M raised from Xora Innovation, Khosla Ventures, and Eclipse, already deployed with three leading semiconductor manufacturers and validated by over half the world's top 20 chip companies.