Senra Systems raises $65M Series B to automate the $165B wire harness market for aerospace and defense

Senra Systems raises $65M Series B to automate the $165B wire harness market

Wire harnesses — the bundled cables, connectors, and wiring that run through aircraft, rockets, and defense systems — are still designed in Excel, Microsoft Paint, and Visio, and assembled entirely by hand. Jordan Black, co-founder and CEO of Senra Systems, is betting a $65M Series B that this is one of the last great unstandardized manufacturing problems in aerospace and defense.

Black founded Senra in 2023, building the first harnesses on his apartment floor after leaving SpaceX. Founders Fund has backed the company from pre-seed through the Series B.

The problem

The $165B wire harness market has no standardized design inputs, no standardized production methods, and no reliable quality benchmarks. Customers typically wait six months or more for delivery, and there's no way to verify quality until the harness is installed and the system powered on — which is how a wiring fault recalls a million Jeep vehicles, or why a misrouted wire in a rocket matters.

Black describes the industry as a Cheesecake Factory with no culinary schools and no recipes. Every batch is improvised.

“Senra is solving the wire harness problem in The US for aerospace and defense... this $165,000,000,000 market... by being the ones that says the bullshit's over, and we're just going to take over and standardize the entire thing... we're over ninety nine percent first capacity yield with our customers.”

Why vertical integration, not SaaS

Senra started with a design tool and got early traction, but Black concluded that customers don't want software — they want the finished harness, delivered fast and working on first installation. That drove a decision to vertically integrate design, engineering partnership, prototyping, and production under one roof.

The company now operates two California factories — Redondo Beach and Cypress — totaling 82,000 square feet. Production quality is above 99% first-pass yield, which Black argues is the primary reason customers return.

The engineering partnership model

Senra positions itself as a co-design partner rather than a contract manufacturer. It works with customers from prototype through production, using proprietary software and AI tooling to analyze bills of materials and suggest cheaper or more available components that meet the same spec. Black frames this as the value layer most suppliers don't offer — no one is telling aerospace customers they're overspecifying a component when a cheaper substitute would perform identically in the final assembly.

Workforce and automation

Rather than hiring experienced technicians at a premium, Senra built a four-week training program that brings new workers up to production standard. Black says roughly 90% of the current workforce came through this program. The company tracks data from design input through work instructions and physical assembly movements to build the dataset needed for future automation.

The roadmap for the next one to five years centers on bringing robotics and semi-automation into the factory floor, with a dedicated team already engaged with both new robotics startups and established incumbents.

Market expansion

Beyond core aerospace and defense, Black sees the data center supply chain — not just facility wiring, but the generators, HVAC, and surrounding infrastructure — as a significant near-term growth vector. Further out, he points to nuclear microreactors as a category requiring exceptionally complex harnesses, with few qualified suppliers and growing demand as companies like Westinghouse scale up.

Senra is actively hiring across operations, industrial engineering, software, automation, and business development.