USA, California
Market: Electronics
Project stage: Operating business
Also this project:
- Participate in the Unicorn Battle
Idea or High Level Concept
Trace is AI-native PCB design platform. You describe what you want, the AI handles schematic generation, component selection, layout, and ships your file straight to a manufacturer.
Traction and Current Status
$13k MRR, 300+ paying customers, 4,000+ downloads, 65+ boards shipped to fab. Button Computer (YC W26) running full design loop in Trace. Brash cut their robotic arm cycle from 12 weeks to 2 weeks. Mike Brown (ex-NASA Goddard, 36 yrs) and Zachariah Peterson (NWES, Altium Academy) partnering as anchor design firms. PCBAA member alongside RTX and Lockheed. Featured in Business Insider (syndicated to Yahoo Finance, Forbes) - 3x enterprise inbound in 48 hours. Founders Inc Artifact batch (1 of 5 from 200+). Acquired scheMAGIC, brought on Hugh Phan (@robonyx, 1M+ followers) as growth.
Problem or Opportunity
Hardware engineers still design circuit boards in tools built decades before AI existed. A single board redesign can burn weeks and tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time. Software engineers got Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code. Hardware engineers got nothing close. Meanwhile robotics funding doubled in 2025, every humanoid, drone, EV, and AI device runs on custom PCBs, and engineers cannot design them fast enough. The incumbents (Cadence, Synopsys, Altium) sit on 30-year-old architectures and cannot ship fast enough to fix it.
Solution
We rebuilt the PCB representation from scratch with two proprietary file formats - .trace_sch for schematics and .trace_pcb for board layout - that AI models can actually reason over the way Cursor reads code. LLMs handle design intent and component selection. Graph neural networks and simulated annealing handle placement. Constraint-aware solvers handle routing. Engineers describe what they want in plain language, work visually in a familiar canvas, and ship a manufacturable board to a US or allied fab in one click.
Weeks of manual iteration collapse into hours.
Business Model, Chanells, Metrics
Three revenue streams. (1) SaaS subscriptions: $29/mo individual, $99/mo pro, $199/mo team plans. (2) Enterprise licensing: $7K-$16K per seat per year for OEM engineering teams, reached via design-firm referrals where Trace-designed boards delivered to Lockheed, NASA, and medical device OEMs surface the tool to internal teams. (3) Manufacturing margin: every board routed from Trace to Pikkolo, PCBWay, or other fab partners earns a referral cut on production.
