Artifact Wants to Be the IDE That Hardware Engineers Actually Deserve

The Macro: Hardware Engineering Tooling Is Stuck in 2005

Software development tools have had a renaissance. GitHub normalized version control. CI/CD pipelines automate testing and deployment. AI copilots write boilerplate code. The entire workflow from writing code to shipping it has been optimized relentlessly for fifteen years.

Hardware engineering got none of this.

If you’re designing electrical systems for an aircraft, a satellite, or a robot, your tools are probably some combination of Mentor Graphics (now Siemens EDA), Altium Designer, Cadence OrCAD, and a lot of spreadsheets. Wire harness designs get passed around as PDFs. Bill of materials live in Excel files that nobody trusts. Version control means naming a file “harness_v14_FINAL_actuallyFINAL.xlsx” and emailing it. I wish I were exaggerating.

The ECAD (Electrical Computer-Aided Design) market is worth roughly $5 billion and is dominated by Siemens, Cadence, and Synopsys. These are powerful tools built for chip design and PCB layout. But for systems-level electrical engineering, the wiring and interconnects that hold complex products together, the tooling is shockingly primitive. Companies building rockets and hypersonic aircraft are still tracking thousands of wires in tools that don’t understand collaboration, version history, or automation.

The Micro: Built by the People Who Needed It Most

This is one of those companies where the founders’ backgrounds aren’t just relevant. They’re the entire thesis.

Antony Samuel, the CEO, was the Avionics Lead at Hermeus, where he built the team and infrastructure behind the avionics for what they called the world’s fastest aircraft. Eight years in aerospace avionics and software. He lived the problem. Every day, his team was designing electrical systems for a hypersonic vehicle using tools that weren’t built for the job. Corbin Klett, the CTO, has a PhD in control theory from Georgia Tech and built embedded software for high-speed aircraft prototypes. These two didn’t read a market report and decide ECAD was interesting. They built avionics for experimental aircraft and got frustrated enough to start a company.

Artifact came through YC’s Winter 2025 batch and raised $3.5M. The product is a collaborative, version-controlled ECAD platform that generates harness drawings, pin-tables, and bills of materials in real-time from system schematics. It integrates with SolidWorks and NX for mechanical CAD interop. It’s ITAR and CUI compliant, which is non-negotiable for aerospace and defense customers. They’ve already landed 16+ companies as customers, including Boom Supersonic (the supersonic airliner company), K2 Space, and Hop Aero. Over 116,000 wires have been designed in the platform.

The AI component is described as “verifiable,” which matters enormously in hardware. A software bug causes an error message. A hardware bug causes a recall, or worse. Any AI generating electrical designs needs to be auditable and traceable. Artifact’s approach of auto-generating artifacts that trace back to a single source of truth is the right way to introduce AI into safety-critical engineering.

The Verdict

I think Artifact has one of the strongest founder-market fits I’ve seen in the YC Winter 2025 batch. Most startup founders identify a problem from the outside. These founders built avionics for experimental aircraft and experienced every shortcoming of existing tools firsthand. That kind of domain expertise is almost impossible to replicate.

The customer list already includes real aerospace companies working on real hardware. That’s not a pilot program. That’s production usage in an industry where switching costs are high and trust is everything. Getting Boom Supersonic to use your tool for their actual aircraft design is a validation signal that’s worth more than any benchmark or demo.

The competitive risk from Siemens and Cadence is worth watching. These are huge companies with deep customer relationships. But they’re focused primarily on chip-level and PCB design, not systems-level wiring and interconnects. Artifact is going after a specific niche that the big players have mostly ignored. That’s how you build a wedge.

At 30 days, the metric is whether new customers are onboarding without heavy hand-holding. At 60 days, I want to see the AI features generating harness designs that engineers trust enough to send to manufacturing without extensive manual review. At 90 days, the question is whether Artifact can expand beyond aerospace into automotive, robotics, and industrial equipment. The problem is the same in every industry that builds complex electromechanical systems. If the product generalizes, this is a very large company.