When Tomide Adesanmi was an electronics engineer at BAE Systems, he worked on helmet-mounted display systems for fighter pilots, some of the most sophisticated hardware in the world. Despite the complexity of the products he was building, much of the design process remained surprisingly manual.
Electronics had advanced dramatically, while many of the workflows used to design them had barely changed.
In 2018, Tomide met Basilio Gentile, an electrical engineer with a PhD from ETH Zurich and deep expertise in mathematical modeling and optimization. Their backgrounds were highly complementary. Tomide brought firsthand experience with the challenges facing electronics engineers, while Basilio brought the technical foundation to model circuit design as a complex optimization problem. That same year, they co-founded Circuit Mind with a vision to fundamentally rethink how electronic systems are designed with AI.
Today, we are excited to announce that Norwest is leading Circuit Mind’s Series A.
A Design Process Ready for Reinvention
Circuit boards are at the heart of nearly every electronic device we use, from the smartphones in our pockets to the cars we drive. While AI has transformed the way software is built, electronics engineering has yet to undergo the same transformation.
Globally, engineers spend over a billion hours annually designing circuit boards. They make thousands of interconnected decisions across architecture, component selection, power, performance, cost, size, and supply-chain availability, often while working across a collection of disconnected tools. A single design iteration can take anywhere from one to eight weeks. Errors discovered later are often costly, requiring redesigns that add weeks or months to a product timeline.
The technology gap is particularly acute at the front end of the design process. While traditional electronic design automation tools are well suited to handle downstream tasks such as layout, simulation, and verification, engineers still rely heavily on manual work to choose architectures, select components, and navigate competing requirements.
Circuit Mind has built for this largely underserved layer of the electronics design stack.
Bringing Intelligence to the Front End of Electronics Design
Electronics design has very little tolerance for error, especially when mistakes in a physical product can require additional manufacturing cycles, testing, and development time. For AI to become truly useful in electronics design, it must operate within the constraints of the physical world.
Circuit Mind’s electronics design intelligence platform gives professional hardware teams AI they can trust to design complex electronic systems. It takes a system-level block diagram and a set of engineering requirements and generates production-ready schematics, bills of materials, and engineering analyses. Engineers can specify constraints around cost, power, size, performance, component availability, and suppliers, then use the platform to rapidly explore designs that satisfy those requirements.
The platform also extends into design verification. Circuit Mind’s newly launched Agentic Verification Engine (AVE) uses AI agents to check designs against component datasheets and an organization’s engineering rules, helping teams identify potential issues before manufacturing.
Circuit Mind takes a system-level block diagram and a set of engineering requirements and generates production-ready schematics, bills of materials, and engineering analyses.
Rather than asking a general-purpose AI model to generate a circuit that merely looks plausible, Circuit Mind spent years building structured digital models of electronic components that capture their electrical behavior, connectivity rules, operating limits, and other real-world characteristics. Its optimization engine combines this component intelligence with mathematical models grounded in circuit physics and engineering rules.
We believe this is what makes Circuit Mind’s approach so powerful. The opportunity is not simply to build another copilot for engineers, but to make the front end of electronics design programmable.
From Faster Design to Better Decisions
The most immediate benefit of Circuit Mind is speed. In an independent evaluation conducted by Los Alamos National Laboratory, the platform completed roughly 90% of a production-representative Printed Circuit Board (PCB) schematics design in just over four hours, versus an estimated 60 to 80 hours of manual engineering effort using traditional workflows.
Through our diligence, we came to believe the greater opportunity lies in expanding the design space engineers can explore. Today, the time and effort required to evaluate a design forces teams to commit to an architecture before fully exploring the alternatives. With Circuit Mind, engineers can evaluate far more approaches and compare tradeoffs across cost, performance, power, size, and availability before going all in on a design. One engineering organization we spoke with described moving from evaluating one or two architectures to as many as 10 to 15 when using Circuit Mind’s product.
With Circuit Mind, engineers can evaluate far more approaches and compare tradeoffs across cost, performance, power, size, and availability before committing to a design.
By enabling engineers to explore more possibilities earlier, Circuit Mind has the potential to improve how quickly hardware gets designed as well as the decisions that ultimately determine what gets built.
Built for the Enterprise
Circuit Mind sits above existing electronic design tools, enabling enterprises to retain their established workflows. The platform can incorporate company-specific knowledge such as approved parts, supplier preferences, engineering constraints, and internal design rules, allowing it to increasingly reflect how each organization actually designs electronic systems.
That approach has resonated with sophisticated engineering organizations across consumer electronics, aerospace and defense, and industrial markets. Throughout our diligence, we repeatedly heard that Circuit Mind’s value extends far beyond automation, and that its ability to fit into existing workflows while improving engineering decisions is what stood out.
Why We Invested
We believe electronics design is approaching an important inflection point. Electronic systems are becoming more complex, product cycles are shortening, and supply-chain considerations have become an increasingly important part of the design process. At the same time, advances in AI are changing what engineers should expect from the software they use.
Circuit Mind has built the technical foundation for that transition. Its combination of structured component intelligence, physics-driven optimization, and deep integration into existing engineering workflows enables the platform to operate within the real-world constraints of electronics design. We believe that foundation will be difficult to replicate with general-purpose AI alone.
We are proud to partner with Tomide, Basilio, and the Circuit Mind team on the journey ahead.
