She watched rocket teams email circuit-board files back and forth. Then she built the tool that made the practice obsolete.
The Work Right Now
Software engineers have spent twenty years arguing about merge conflicts. Hardware engineers were still attaching v7_FINAL_really.sch to an email.
That gap is the whole company. AllSpice.io, the platform Valentina Ratner co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO, treats a printed circuit board the way GitHub treats code: branches, pull requests, visual diffs, line-by-line review, an audit trail of who changed which capacitor and why. The engineers who design rockets, robots, and pacemakers can finally see exactly what moved between revisions.
In June 2025 she closed a $15 million Series A led by Rethink Impact. The money is pointed at one thing: pulling the AllSpice AI Agent out of private beta. The agent reads a design and flags the mistakes a tired engineer at 11pm would miss - the kind of mistakes that, in hardware, cost a fabrication run and three weeks.
Her customer list reads like a deep-tech hall of fame: Blue Origin building rockets, Bose building speakers, and Tools for Humanity - Sam Altman's hardware venture - building whatever it is building. They share a problem Ratner names plainly.
"The cost of a hardware mistake is so much higher than the cost of a software mistake," she says. You cannot hotfix a soldered board. You re-spin it, and you wait. So AllSpice borrows the discipline of software - review before merge, automate the boring checks, keep the history - and aims it at the physical world.
She is deliberate about the AI rollout, releasing it in closed beta on purpose. In a domain where a wrong answer melts a chip, accuracy beats reach. It is the rare founder move that says no to growth on purpose.
"The cost of a hardware mistake is so much higher than the cost of a software mistake."Valentina Ratner
By The Numbers
How She Got Here
Valentina Ratner grew up in Argentina and moved to Boston for school, where she earned a mechanical engineering degree at Boston University. Then she went to Amazon - and her last big project there was, of all things, building an internal collaboration tool to fix exactly the hardware-workflow mess she would later make her life's work.
The pattern she kept seeing: "capable teams build complex systems using archaic workflows that had not really evolved." Brilliant people, stone-age tooling. The observation lodged and would not leave.
In the fall of 2018 she enrolled in the first cohort of Harvard's MS/MBA dual-degree program - a master's in engineering with a computer-science slant, stacked on an MBA. There she met Kyle Dumont, who had felt the same pain building robots at iRobot. They spent a semester comparing notes and looking for a tool that already solved it.
There wasn't one. So they built it. She left Harvard with the degrees and the inaugural Dupre-Nunnelly Innovation Leader Award, and not long after, with a co-founder and a company.
She lives in San Francisco now, with her husband, a young son, and a miniature schnauzer who is not, as far as anyone knows, version-controlled.
The Arc
Mechanical engineer, then product manager at Amazon - builds internal productivity and project-management tooling for hardware teams.
Meets co-founder Kyle Dumont in the first class of Harvard's MS/MBA dual-degree program.
Co-founds AllSpice.io and takes the CEO seat - and, early on, the first sales seat too.
AllSpice crosses $10M in venture funding as enterprise hardware teams adopt the platform.
Closes a $15M Series A led by Rethink Impact; takes the AllSpice AI Agent out of private beta.
"Some of the most valuable things we learned were the things people didn't want."Valentina Ratner, on listening to users
The Operator
"Being the first salesperson was invaluable and gave me the foundation needed to build a stronger, more informed sales team later." No prior sales background - she learned the pitch by giving it.
She interviews with anonymized, real-world problems rather than brainteasers. "Approach the interview process as a two-way street." If a candidate misses on more than one axis, she walks.
Famously organized - she documents process in detailed Notion workspaces and reworked hiring plans to extend runway when the market turned. Adaptable beats heroic.
Who Trusts It
From startups to the Fortune 500 - aerospace, robotics, defense, instrumentation, consumer electronics, mass transit, autonomous vehicles, and medical devices.
Margins & Marginalia
Argentine by birth, Bostonian by schooling, San Franciscan by company. The route to building the GitHub of electronics ran through three cities.
Her final big Amazon project was an internal collaboration tool for the exact hardware problem she now sells against. The job was a rehearsal.
She and Kyle Dumont met in Harvard's first MS/MBA cohort in 2018. One semester of shared frustration, one company.
Home in San Francisco includes a husband, a young son, and a miniature schnauzer - the only team member without a Notion doc.
"Capable teams build complex systems using archaic workflows."Valentina Ratner, on the problem she set out to kill
The Bet
She wants AllSpice to be the home base for every electronics team - data transparency and automation that lets hardware finally move at the speed of software.