Quilter raises $25M Series B from Index Ventures to automate circuit board design

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Our next guest is already in the reream waiting room. We're going to bring him in to the TVP. What's going on? Welcome. How are you doing? Hey, doing well. How about you guys? Thanks for having me. We're doing great. Uh, please kick us off with an introduction on you, the company. Any news you have for us? All right.

Uh, my name is Serenko, CEO, founder of a company called Quilter. Uh, in a nutshell, what we do is we make it much easier to design circuit boards. Right. So, we're talking about these things. Uh, we just raised a series B with Index. And that's kind of what the news we're sharing. How much did you raise? There we go.

25. 25. Uh, Index. They're uh one of probably the most potentially the most underrated fund. uh in in the world. Uh very very cool. What uh what got you into this into this business and when did you start it? Yeah, so I started the company a little over 5 years ago at this point.

What got me into this specific uh kind of role was uh my time in SpaceX, right? Spent five years designing Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy Avionics. Saw everything there is to see about how to work with circuit boards and how difficult it is and suffered every pain. Right. And so that was the direct inspiration.

What's the biggest lesson that you took from working with Elon Musk to this new company? Oh man, there's so many. How much time do we have? Right. I think that probably the best thing is first principles, first principal thinking, right? I know this is echoed many times. I'll just echo it again. Right.

It's so important. You just have to question everything. How you deal with people, how you deal with organizations, technology, you name it. If you just really apply that everywhere, probably everything else stems from it. Walk us through some of the fastest growing use cases for uh PC board build, PCB board building.

uh where are the growth areas? Are you trying to go after more legacy stable production flows and and optimize those on cost, time, etc. or are you looking for new markets that are scaling very quickly or both? You know, honestly, it's we definitely see both, right?

The biggest thing that people are looking for from us is time to market.

Um so the same way you you know you write code you don't just write a thousand lines and throw it in production you test little pieces you write unit tests all these things electronics engineers do the same thing right and so um whether you're an older company or an aerospace company or a consumer company everybody's trying to get to market faster and so where we see more demand is just from that pressure and people trying to build validation cases test cases all of those things as quickly as they can yeah help me understand is there is size a function here like if I'm building a PCB for a car.

Is that different than an AI pendant? Am I using completely different tooling in software or is it a kind of a one-sizefits-all problem? Sure. For us, it's a it's mostly one size fits all, right? So, these different areas have different constraints, different things that you care about, right?

So, in a rocket, mass is one of the most important things. You want to make it as light as possible. In a consumer device, it might be as cheap as possible, right? In a phone, it might be as dense as possible.

But at the end of the day, all of these boards are made out of the same materials with a similar enough processes and they all concern themselves with electromagnetics, thermodynamics, the same kinds of physics.

And so we solution we're building is meant for really any of them just like you know um something like cursor is meant for any software engineer. Do you uh uh what's the state of uh uh the market in terms of like the super mature companies? Do they have internal teams that don't necessarily need to partner with you?

Um, or are they actually a better client going after a Fortune 500 company or a hyperscaler or a SpaceX for example? Is that who you want as like a wheelhouse customer or do you want someone that's a smaller faster growing company that's maybe um doesn't have the internal resources to staff up?

You know, in principle, it could be both, but from our experience, we found that the the biggest companies are the ones pulling us the most, which which was a surprise to me. Yeah. And the reason for that is that they have by far more designs that they're doing in any given day.

So that compounds and the second thing is that the cost of a day for a big company is much more than the cost of a day for a startup. And so you have this kind of two-fold benefit that makes it so that big companies pull us even a lot harder than than startups and small companies. You guys are focused on design.

what uh give us an overview of what's happening on the manufacturing side. Uh are you seeing uh there's obviously been huge energy in in the private markets around re-industrialization well in public markets as well.

Are are you seeing a boom in uh potential uh actual manufacturing here in the US or or where where if you guys you know help a company you know design something where is it getting made? Yeah, it's a great question.

Um so in general I should state real quick that manufacturing a board is almost nothing like manufacturing a chip right when you think about chips you think about TSMC it's really really hard you know we have hundreds of fabs here in the US and and thousands in China and abroad so it's just a slightly different kind of process um which it's a good thing right um now of course I would encourage a lot more investment in those right like I think everybody here has in this industry complains it takes very long to get a board turned around that's too expensive certainly it's there's orders of magnitude cost difference between where we are in the US versus in China.

Uh, and so we definitely need to improve in that on that piece of it. Um, but I would say the where most people are going domestically is for quick turnarounds, right? If I want to board tomorrow or in 3 days, you're going to make it here and you're going to pay for it.

If I want to board in quantity, you're going you're going ashore, right? You're going to China or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

I toured George Hutz's facility in San Diego where he makes the comma AI and he has a machine that does the board manufacturing and he's like it's a small company but he's vertically integrated. It's remarkable. He even has like a data center there. He trains AI models on it too.

He he's one of the most remarkable folks in the world. How big is the team today? Yeah, we're about 25 at this point. Obviously growing 25 with 25 mil. That's a good spot to be. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the update. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Great to meet you.

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