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

guest in the waiting room. Let me tell you about Cisco first. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And we have Jordan Black from Senra Systems. He's the co-founder and CEO with a huge funding announcement. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Long overdue. I mean, I heard about this company because you've been working with Founders Fund for a while, right? But take me through a little bit of the history, introduce yourself and the company.

Absolutely. Uh Jordan Black, CEO, co-founder, uh started this company a little over three years ago, right out of my apartment building wire harnesses on my carpet floor.

Yeah.

Uh Founders Fund, been uh great investor in us since the preede all the way to uh series B, which we just did.

How much was the series B? Tyler's going to hit the gong.

How much? Let's go.

How much did you raise?

$65 million.

Okay. So, uh, explain like I'm five the the the the product, the customer base, what's fueled the growth, what's uh what's in the supply chain, what do you what's your key value ad?

Perfect. Uh, I brought some props on the show, but fantastic. Senra is solving the wire harness problem uh in the US for aerospace defense. And you're probably wondering what a wire harness is or anyone watching this.

And this is what it is. It's just like a bundle of wires, connectors, cables. Think of it like your iPhone charger, but a lot more complex. And this whole thing I'm holding in my hands is designed in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. And it's all done by hand today as well by really skilled workforce putting this together. and think of it like a cheesecake factory, but trying to scale it. It's really complex and there's no culinary schools that exist and no recipes and you just got to figure it out and make it happen, too.

How on earth are people designing these in PowerPoint? That seems like a crime. Like, is it they're drawing out little diagrams on on PowerPoint slides with like the the the the draw line tool?

They use that. They use Microsoft Paint. Vizio is a big one. People design things on and this is anything from the large aerospace defense companies to startups too. But it's it's the

the input into wire harnessing is not standardized. The output of who builds this, how you build it, what's the right way to build is not standardized. And like Senra's solving this$und65 billion market uh by being the ones that says like the bullshit's over and we're just going to take over and standardize the entire thing. So why not a pure software solution like just wire harnessing SAS? There are big companies that have been grappling with vertical integration. The Ander SpaceX like I imagine that you could sell this as a SAS product but why why work on the actual production?

That's where the problem is. I we started the company even with the design tool and we got some traction with that too.

Okay. At the end of the day, every company just wants the wire harness and they want to come faster than it normally is. They want to plug in and work. Uh, and it's the quality, it's the speed, it's the cost, but they care about the physical product. And I think if you want to make a generational company where it's like where were we before Google Maps, you know, came out. It's like where how are we building harnesses in the US today? It's like where was Senra 10 years ago? And that's kind of what the goal we want to have. Um, but to fix the problem, we need to vertically integrate the entire thing. And what what's driving the customers to Senra? Is it uh speed because you're local? Is it forward deployed uh engineers that you've sent into organizations to sort of co-design wire harnesses before you make them? Is it the made in America or price or speed? Like what what are the key factors that jump out?

Yeah, I think just being better is not is not how we're going to win and how how we're going to win every time, but it's like quality is our number one thing. Like it's really hard to get a high quality harness because it's all done by hand. So you don't know it works until you plug it in, turn on the rocket, and the wires fit in the right spot or the wires aren't crossed and the whole thing blows it up. Like they just recall like a million Jeep vehicles because like the wire harnessing is bad. Like this is a really big problem just in any industry. So quality is our number one thing. Uh and we're over 99% first pass yield with all our customers and like you just will never go out of style and this is why you keep coming back to us. Uh the second is going to be speed. It usually takes months to quote something, takes, you know, even over six months to even get a wire harness from a customer company today. We're just going to be faster uh for the customers we're growing with. And the last one's like that forward deployed engineering portion of it. So we do everything prototype to production. So we will partner with the neo primes, the primes, just any of these companies say let's be your engineering partner. let's be your expert and tell you how you should design this thing, how you should be thinking about it and let's go build you the prototypes and let's go scale in the production sense of it. Like we're not just your contract manufacturer like here's the PowerPoint slide, go build it. It's like here's the PowerPoint slide, let's go design this perfectly, build the prototypes perfectly and then make this least your problems in the long term too.

What what subcategories of electronics or or or products are actually growing their wire harness footprint? I'm thinking of like the smart fridge boom where there was a move to put a screen and a Wi-Fi router in every device in your kitchen and it feels like that sort of peaked and maybe that's declining. Um, what are you seeing outside of the obvious automotive space defense categories that are sort of like sneakily interesting markets or maybe on a growth trajectory that you might not have expected unless you were on the ground in the industry? Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, I think it's it's it's maybe obvious, but like the data center uh is a big one, but what's really interesting, it's not just the wiring that goes in the data centers, but the surrounding uh infrastructure around it. So, like we need more generators, we need more chillers, we need more HVAC equipment.

So, you're seeing a really big uh inflection point in that sector too. um aerospace on just the actual commercial aerospace like more satellites you know obviously defense with everything growing in too um but anything that requires electricity so now you're seeing all these new energy companies so I think the one that's going to start taking off is going to be like micro reactors or nuclear reactors like those are really difficult wire harnesses to build and there's not a lot of people who know how to build that stuff as well so as people the new incumbents and the westing houses of the world start like uh scaling up it's like we're ready to be kind of part part of that journey as well too.

What does your path to automation look like? Uh how how like a how did you make the first wire harness? How are you making one today? What does it look like in a decade?

Um it's scaled from me building it in my apartment three years ago and just going to investors saying look I have revenue. I can build wire harnesses. Um,

so you like literally like ordered the parts on Amazon and like put it together. Basically,

I just put together carpet floor. I got, you know, this this PO let's uh revenue generating uh within the first few weeks. Um, I think the first year was uh got a really great team of like because of my background is from SpaceX of like really skilled technicians who've been doing this for 10 20 years and they were building harnesses. Now probably over 90% of our workforce is people who we've trained to go build a harness in four weeks versus the number of years it takes to go build that.

Um so I think that's like the inflection point now of like how do you scale the unscalable it's like build a training program build an operating system for them to go build these harnesses on and then build as much integrate as much semi-automation to the factory too. And I think what's going to happen in the next like one to five year range is like we have a dedicated team working on AI and robotics of like talking to all the new companies talking to the existing incumbents of like we are ready to go bring in as much robotics and much automation into this factory. We're tracking all the data from the design input into telling technicians exactly how to do with work instructions to the physical automation data points of like how are they doing things with their hands. Um, and the really goal I think everyone from the technicians building it to the executive level suite is how do we automate this as much as possible? And I think that's the really exciting part, but we have a really good foundation of like we're building this, we're collecting the data, we're working with our customers, we're seeing what their cost points are and trying to grow as much as possible.

Uh, a couple years ago, Daniel Gross wrote a blog post called AGI Bets and I think the very first one was uh, is copper underpriced? Which I think was a very funny one. He was 100% right. copper has uh has risen in cost a lot. Do you think about raw material input costs as uh an important lever on your business? Do you hedge is this material or uh or are you able to pass it through to customers and not have it affect the core business?

Uh I think it's a little bit of both, but overall it's like we're buying this and we're we're we're not making the copper wire. We're not making the connectors. We assemble it. That's kind of our point of um value ad. But I think the difference is because we're this engineering partner,

we want to be a cost effective supplier for these customers too. So we can go we have actually our own software um that we built out in an AI tool that ends up like looking at the bomb or the bill of material cost and says this is how much it should be and then suggesting to the customer you should go with XYZ other component because it's cheaper, readily available, it will work for your application. But nobody's telling them this is how you should do it. And that's why I say it's so much like a cheesecake factory of like why are we using this really exquisite beef when we can go maybe this over here which like has the same flavor or you can't even taste it once you put a,000 calories of cheese on it or something like that too. So um that's really I think the value ad too is like if the price copper is going up

nothing we can necessarily change in our control to do that besides having better suppliers and distributors we work with and working with our end customers of choosing the right products for them to do. Where are you based and who are you hiring?

We have two factories, one in Roondo Beach and then one in Cypress, California. Uh, and that's we just opened that up. It's 82,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Um, and we're hiring all across the board. We're hiring in operations, so technicians, engineers, um, industrial uh, engineers as well too. Manufacturing people just be on the the ground floor building the factory from the ground up. And it's really exciting. is like there's not a lot of green field factories that you say this is how things should be built. This is how they should be done. This is we're building the ship as we're um uh driving it to. Um we're hiring people on the engineering side from the software perspective and automation of like how do we go have the lever of making this more efficient and more automated in the future. Um, and then we're also hiring against like business development and sales of like partnering with these customers and the program management side of like you get to go to fly these customers, see what the wire harness needs are, see what your product goes into and like really get integrated with their end uh their end goals too.

Very cool. Well, congratulations on the new round. Thank you for everything you're doing and thank you for coming on the show. Have a great Thursday and have a great weekend.

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