Colare Turns Hardware Hiring Into Real Engineering Work

Hardware hiring has a costly blind spot: résumés and interviews can show what an engineer says, but not how that engineer solves a real problem. Colare wants to close that gap by putting candidates inside realistic engineering simulations before anyone books an interview.

The San Francisco company launched publicly with $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, introducing what it describes as the first technical assessment platform built for hardware talent screening. The round includes Afore Capital, Garage Capital, and Acadian Ventures, giving Colare capital to scale its simulation-based hiring platform.

Testing the Work Before the Interview

Colare runs technical assessments that mirror the tools and decisions engineers face on the job. Candidates work through realistic engineering problems, while the platform evaluates both their process and their final output.

The company maps a role from the employer’s job description to assessments across several disciplines, including computer-aided design, printed circuit board design, thermal analysis, finite element analysis, and systems problem-solving. These simulations focus on how candidates apply knowledge to physical-world constraints instead of testing whether they can memorize an equation.

That distinction matters because hiring one mechanical, electrical, or embedded engineer can consume roughly 40 hours of senior engineering time across screening calls, take-home reviews, and onsite interviews. Colare says hardware teams have had no reliable way to test hardware skills before investing that time.

“Hardware companies are building some of the most technically ambitious products in the world, and they are still evaluating engineers with proxies for whether someone can actually do the job,” said Esther Thomas, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare.

Colare builds its assessment rubrics around judgments from senior engineers who have shipped hardware. Its goal is to turn the intuition experienced engineers use to recognize strong talent into a signal that can scale across hundreds of candidates, giving every applicant the same technical bar.

A Hiring Bottleneck for Expanding Hardware Teams

Colare’s launch arrives as hardtech hiring accelerates. Aerospace and defense funding reached $35.6 billion in the first half of 2026, while one Colare space customer is adding up to 50 open roles a month.

The company already works with organizations ranging from newly funded startups to multi-billion-dollar aerospace manufacturers, and half of its clients currently operate in aerospace and defense. Colare says its platform also targets energy, manufacturing, and other industries where engineering mistakes can create expensive physical consequences.

Nain Abdi, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare, encountered the problem firsthand as an electrical engineer at Ford. His team stopped trusting résumés because candidates who looked strong on paper often struggled during technical interviews.

“Because hardware engineering is not about memorizing an equation – it’s how you take that knowledge and apply it to the constraints of building in the physical world,” Abdi said. “Our assessments are grounded in first principles, real engineering work across critical industries and disciplines. Testing not just one, or three, but hundreds of candidates, on the same bar.”

That approach has already appeared in different hiring settings. A two-person chemical manufacturing startup used Colare as the technical evaluation layer its founders did not have in-house when hiring its first electrical engineer. At a subsidiary of a public manufacturer, Colare flagged major engineering gaps in a candidate who had passed the initial screen and was heading toward the CEO round.

“Instead of using senior engineers to discover basic capability late in the process, we can see much earlier how candidates approach the work they would actually be doing here,” said John Slack, CEO of Rhoic.

From Candidate Work to Scalable Decisions

Colare returns a detailed debrief that assesses each candidate and supports scheduling and industry-specific hiring workflows. Its candidate dashboard is designed to compare strengths and gaps, benchmark talent, and rank candidates by role.

The platform also describes bulk assessment delivery, progress tracking, and links employers can distribute through job postings or candidate communications. Colare presents integration with applicant tracking systems as part of the workflow and advertises API support for other systems.

For smaller companies, the value is access to a technical evaluation process they may not have the staff to build. For larger engineering organizations, the promise is scale: hundreds of candidates can face comparable simulations without pulling senior engineers away from building products.

Slack described the challenge from the employer’s side: “One of the challenges I’ve always had is actually doing a technical interview for someone — especially for us, given neither of us are electrical engineers. We don’t know what good looks like in an answer.”

Every assessment Colare runs captures something a résumé never has: how an engineer actually thinks through real work. That signal could reshape how hardware companies screen talent as teams expand and technical roles multiply.

With its public launch and $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, Colare is betting that engineering hiring should begin closer to the work itself. If simulations can reveal strong judgment before the first interview, hardware teams may spend less time searching through proxies and more time building with the right people.

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