hardware-engineering
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Bild
Bild is a San Francisco cloud PDM/PLM platform that moves hardware design collaboration off email, spreadsheets, and shared drives and into the browser. Founded in 2021 by ex-Apple engineering program manager Pradyut Paul, it gives mechanical and hardware teams version control, check-in/check-out, bill-of-materials, change orders, and secure supplier sharing across multiple CAD formats, plus an AI suite for diffing and searching designs.
Proception
Proception is a Palo Alto and Mountain View robotics company building the dexterous robotic hand that humanoids are missing. Its flagship ProHand 1.0 packs 22 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven fingers and skin-like tactile sensors into a hand designed with input from surgeons - close enough to a human hand that robots can learn directly from human demonstration. A companion sensor glove, ProGlove, captures real human manipulation data at scale to train those movements. Founded in 2024 by former Tesla Optimus engineers Jay Li and Jack Xu, the company raised an $11M seed led by First Round Capital and is shipping its first hands to research labs and robotics companies.
Jay Li
Jay Li is the founder and CEO of Proception, a Palo Alto robotics startup building high-dexterity robotic hands for humanoid robots. A former electronics lead on Tesla's Optimus program, he left to bet that the fastest path to capable robots runs through hardware close enough to the human hand that machines can learn directly from people. His ProHand packs 22 degrees of freedom and skin-like tactile sensors; its companion ProGlove captures human manipulation data with no robot in the loop. In June 2026 Proception shipped its first hands, settled a Tesla trade-secret lawsuit, and closed an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital on the same day.
Pradyut Paul
Pradyut Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Bild, a San Francisco cloud-native product data management (PDM) platform built for hardware engineers. A former RFIC designer at Raytheon and hardware program manager at Apple (iPhone 8 through 11, early AirTags), he started Bild while earning his MBA at Yale, raised $3M in seed funding months after graduating in 2021, and pivoted the company toward version control and collaboration for mechanical engineering teams - growing revenue tenfold in 2023.
Valentina Ratner
Valentina Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of AllSpice.io, the 'GitHub for hardware' that brings version control, collaboration, and automated design review to the engineers who build PCBs, schematics, and bills of materials. An Argentina-born mechanical engineer turned Amazon PM turned Harvard MS/MBA, she launched AllSpice after watching brilliant teams build complex machines on archaic, file-shuffling workflows. In June 2025 she raised a $15M Series A to take the company's AI design-validation agent out of private beta, with customers spanning Blue Origin, Bose, and Tools for Humanity.
Kamran Maniar
Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.