Quilter, the first company to publicly demonstrate fully autonomous PCB layout through physics-driven AI, closed $25 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures. The round brings Quilter’s total capital raised to $40 million from investors including Benchmark, Coatue, Root Ventures, and industry experts like Lip-Bu Tan.

Fortune 500 companies in aerospace, defense, and consumer electronics—representing a $500 billion market capitalization—are adopting Quilter’s technology to transform how their engineering teams design, test, and validate hardware. The investment arrives as demand for PCB design automation reaches what the company calls an inflection point in the $1 trillion hardware industry.

Why Circuit Board Design Has Become a Bottleneck

PCB layout sits on the critical path of every hardware project. It can’t begin until mechanical design and schematics are locked, and it can’t be parallelized across teams. Demand has outpaced global engineering capacity. Meanwhile, original equipment manufacturers and Tier-1 suppliers face continued pressure to accelerate product development and reduce costs.

Quilter is cutting weeks of PCB design work down to minutes. “In five years, designing a PCB manually will feel like compiling code by hand,” said Sergiy Nesterenko, CEO and founder of Quilter. “Our customers are starting to view board design as instant and unlimited, making it inexpensive to test ideas and speeding up innovation.”

Training AI on Physics Instead of Patterns

Existing automation tools don’t understand physics. They produce designs requiring extensive manual cleanup, which negates any promised time savings. Quilter isn’t an autorouter, a co-pilot, or an LLM. It’s complete automation that turns PCB design into a self-serve task.

The company is building a reinforcement learning system trained on fundamental physics rather than human patterns. By training on first-principle physics, Quilter focuses on eliminating human errors by quantifying the electromagnetic and thermal effects that can ruin a board design. The goal is to eventually train this system to produce better PCB designs than any human has ever achieved.

“We built Quilter from first principles, training our AI on the fundamental physics of electronics—electromagnetic behavior, thermodynamics, signal propagation,” said Nesterenko. “This approach lets us discover optimal solutions that have never been tried before. When you start from physics rather than patterns, you can achieve designs that surpass what any human has created.”

Defense Contractors and Automotive Suppliers Are Already Using It

Leading aerospace contractors, national defense laboratories, and consumer electronics giants have quietly integrated Quilter into their development cycles.

Defense contractors are using Quilter-designed boards in spaceflight qualification tests, where precision and reliability are critical. A global Tier-1 automotive company is using Quilter to slash test board iteration cycles from weeks to days for designs approaching production qualification. A major electronics distributor completed board sizing studies in a matter of hours using Quilter. These high-stakes industries are saving significant time and manual labor.

“Quilter can make our control boards for an inverter, and we will be three months earlier on the market. Then this is a big advantage that cannot be simply justified by only a cost comparison of the hours that the engineers would have taken to realize that, because it could decide if we get a billion-dollar contract or not,” said a senior engineering manager at a global Tier-1 automotive supplier, responsible for technology scouting and digitalization initiatives aimed at accelerating product development.

Founded by a SpaceX Engineer to Solve a Hardware Problem

Sergiy Nesterenko founded Quilter in 2019 after working as an engineer at SpaceX. The company pioneers fully autonomous AI PCB design through physics-driven reinforcement learning. Quilter is transforming hardware development into a continuous, agile process by automating placement, routing, and verification to deliver completed designs in minutes, rather than weeks.

Quilter fits into existing enterprise workflows with minimal disruption. Teams continue using their existing tools—Altium Designer, Cadence Allegro/OrCAD, or Siemens Xpedition—while Quilter accelerates placement and layout velocity. The company is rapidly expanding integrations across the entire hardware development stack, ensuring teams can adopt AI-powered design without changing their established processes.

The platform runs natively on private cloud and GovCloud with on-premise deployment available for sensitive environments. Quilter is currently under observation for SOC 2 Type II compliance.

Investors See a Generational Opportunity in Hardware Automation

Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures, is joining Quilter’s board as part of the investment. “What excites us about Quilter isn’t just the scale of the opportunity, but Sergiy’s ability to see it so clearly. By applying reinforcement learning from first principles, Sergiy and his team are delivering a step-change in hardware design,” said Achadjian. “We believe this is a generational opportunity to redefine electronics innovation across some of the most important industries of our time.”

Beyond the companies already deploying Quilter, the startup is now engaged with OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers representing over $8 trillion in combined market value. This demand signals PCB design automation has reached an inflection point where adoption is no longer optional for competitive hardware development.

The Series B funding will accelerate Quilter’s growth in top aerospace and defense, automotive, and consumer electronics firms. The company is hiring and expanding its integrations across the hardware development stack.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/index-ventures-leads-25m-round-for-quilter-ai/
Originally Posted: Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:25:45 +0000