Smartphones, medical devices, and fighter jets all rely on the same foundational component: the printed circuit board (PCB). These copper-and-silicon grids are the nervous system of nearly every modern machine. Yet while the devices they power have evolved rapidly, the way PCBs are designed and manufactured remains outdated. It’s fragmented, error-prone, and constrained by legacy systems.
Despite the scale of the PCB industry, design tools like Cadence and Altium — worth nearly $100 billion combined — are expensive, rigid, and out of touch with real-world manufacturing. Engineers often ship designs that can’t be produced or that fail unexpectedly because the tools didn’t catch issues upfront.
Meanwhile, reshoring efforts, trade frictions, and supply chain delays compound the problem. American manufacturers are already behind on automation and are now being asked to move faster with brittle, outdated systems.
Ask any electrical engineer: the typical workflow is painful. You design a board in a siloed EDA tool, export a batch of files, send them off to a fabricator, and then … wait. Days later, you might get a cryptic note about a spacing violation, drill misalignment, or an unsupported stack-up. You fix it, resubmit, and repeat. If you’re lucky, the board gets built — but by then, a critical part might be out of stock, or a trace fails under thermal stress. You’re back in revision mode, burning time and budget.
We think that’s about to change, and that’s why we’re excited to announce our Series A investment in Diode.
Diode is rethinking the PCB workflow by embedding AI and real-world production constraints into the design process to ensure generated layouts aren’t just functional, but actually manufacturable at scale and on the timelines that matter. Instead of just drawing schematics, engineers using Diode automatically optimize their layouts for dynamic, real-world constraints and get working boards delivered, not just files.
That’s no small task. PCB fabrication is governed by thousands of informal rules, shop-specific quirks, and tribal knowledge. Diode translates this into structured, machine-readable logic, replacing back-and-forth emails and production delays with clean code and clear outcomes.
And like any good software, it learns. Every board shipped makes the platform smarter — catching more errors, accelerating iteration, and reducing risk. Early adopters in defense, aerospace, and robotics are already seeing the payoff. Diode doesn’t just help engineers design better; it abstracts an entire supply chain into a single platform.
And what starts with PCBs can expand across the entire hardware stack. In Shenzhen, founders can walk a few blocks and find everything they need — PCB shops, molders, assembly lines — all packed into a dense ecosystem built for speed and iteration. America can’t replicate that physical clustering. Instead, its edge lies in a distributed network of shops and factories, stitched together by software that makes geography irrelevant. A digital supply street where designing, ordering, manufacturing, and delivering happen in real time, no matter the distance.
Behind this vision is a world-class founding team. CEO Davide Asnaghi and CTO Lenny Khazan are technical prodigies with unusually deep range across hardware and software — from Apple and Butterfly Network to Chromatic. Diode is the product they always wished they had.
Their timing couldn’t be better. Hardware complexity is rising, and engineering capacity is stretched thin. Diode offers a platform to help America build faster, smarter, and domestically. Engineers aren’t asking for more AI-design software; they’re asking for working boards. Diode delivers.
