The control plane for electrical engineering. Design, build and validate hardware faster.

01 - The problem

The expensive part of hardware is not drawing the board.

The cost of one unconnected power rail missed in schematic review.

Senior EE (ex-Meta, ex-Fitbit), discovery interview, July 2026

• • Drawing the schematic is a slice of the job. Architecture, component selection, datasheet work, constraint entry, review, documentation and bring-up all sit around it, and each of them lives in a different tool that knows nothing about the others.
• • The context between those steps lives in one engineer's head. Why that regulator, what was ruled out, what the board actually did on the bench: none of it is anywhere a colleague can find it.
• • First-spin boards rarely work. Each revision consumes 20-40 senior-EE hours at $150-300/hr, and until the board is validated all downstream firmware work stalls.
• • For funded teams the delay is the cost, not the dollars. A schematic error costs 2-3 weeks of China turnaround, "almost months" once it compounds. "We have to increase our shots on goal." CTO, venture-backed neurotech startup.

02 - The customer

Venture-backed robotics, drone and aerospace companies building their own electronics with almost no EE bench.

Robotics Registry, 2026. Robotics only; drone and aerospace companies come on top.

• • 1-3 electrical engineers, often one, sometimes none. A humanoid-robotics company ran 13+ months on a single EE; a 3-person team that raised $50M has no EE at all, so a mechatronics engineer makes it happen.
• • Small by design: more than half are under 50 people. The designer is alone with the risk, with no second engineer to review the schematic, check contractor output, or answer FAE-grade component questions.
• • The budget already exists. >800 venture-funded companies holding $80B+ in venture capital, hiring EEs at $150k+ fully loaded for roles that sit open. A coscope seat costs a tenth of the hire they can't make.
• • AI-native, but loyal to their CAD. These teams already run agentic AI and are actively looking for more of it. Schematic capture and PCB layout stay in the best-in-class tools (Altium, Cadence OrCAD); coscope works alongside them and never asks a team to switch.

Not the customer: companies that outsource electronics design, and legacy automotive/industrial teams with entrenched process.

03 - The solution

coscope is the control plane for the EE workflow.

Two things change the job: altitude, the size of the thing an engineer specifies, and context that spans the whole workflow instead of only one step.

Shipping today: project audit and maturity assessment, datasheet fetching, component selection, documentation and power-tree generation, schematic-vs-board consistency checks, ERC/DRC, floor planning against an enclosure, and autorouting via Freerouting. Bring-up and bench-instrument control are next.

A trillion-dollar tech company tested this internally: checking a schematic component by component against datasheets caught 100% of injected errors, where naive prompting caught 5-10%.

04 - Traction

In users' hands, and coming back with results.

• • 7 users installed on real projects, the first of them 10 days ago. An installable product, in their hands, on live designs.
• • 3 have already run it on real designs and come back with results. One got correct part identification and use, plus floor planning and a routed board, over a weekend. "I had previously tried Flux.ai and it was embarrassingly bad for a similar problem, yours could actually save me some time."
• • A live session re-laid out a board to fit a smaller enclosure. That work costs the user ~$5k by hand including the PCB spin, roughly $4k of it engineering time, and opens up a whole new market segment: customers he currently has to turn away.
• • A user who had been checking a chatbot's answers three times over before trusting them: "I have been using Claude to do that, and then frantically checking over that 3x." coscope points at the datasheet it came from, so that stops.
• • Paid conversion built in: pilots run free for the first months, then convert to paid seats, on terms already accepted verbally.
• • Robotics pipeline behind them: a drone flight-controller pilot starts 4 September; engineers at two robotics companies are personally committed, working organizational sign-off.
• • 25+ discovery interviews with senior EEs and engineering leaders.
• • Investors are already sourcing customers: several pilots came referred by VCs interested in coscope.

05 - Why me

20 years taking hardware from lab bench to factory line.

Tom Elliot - Founder

• • Fitbit: built the industry's first all-day wrist-worn heart-rate sensor (Surge); Sensor Systems Lead, Ionic. Tens of millions of units sold on hardware I developed.
• • INFARM: Head of Hardware Engineering, team of 12. The equipment my team designed carried tens of millions of € in deployed capital.
• • Senic: Head of Engineering, shipped connected consumer hardware.
• • FluidSEO: bootstrapped B2B SaaS to $3k MRR at 95% margin. Runs on about an hour a month, 3 years and counting.

Two months old. Two weeks of it building. Seven users are installed and running on real projects off a fortnight of engineering, and three have already sent feedback back. The rest of the time went to validating the problem with 25+ engineers, a two-week San Francisco trip that produced the entire pilot cohort, and the investor relationships behind this round.

The insight: AI-EDA startups build for the design file, because that's the artifact a software founder can see. The engineer's real job is the twenty decisions around it and the context that has to survive between them. coscope exists because I've made those decisions for twenty years and know the limitations of these tools first hand.

06 - Business model

$1,200 per engineer, per month.

Annual SaaS seat, sold to the engineering lead. Design partners get their first months free, then 50% pricing ($600/mo) locked for their first year.

07 - Market

$1.8B a year: what teams already pay to draw boards.

PCB design-software revenue, 2025, and growing every quarter.

The tooling covers the drawing; the labor costs 5-10× more. An ECAD seat runs $2-9k/year, while the engineer behind it burns $10-75k/year on bring-up, debug, and review. coscope reprices the same seats against the labor, not the license.

The high end is priced out of reach: PCB-level simulation needs a ~$500k/year Cadence licence. Small teams go without, and so did Apple's Mac group, per an ex-Apple founder.

08 - Why now

A new buyer, and a bigger one than the tooling market assumes.

1. 1

   The buyer is new. 500+ robotics companies have been founded since 2021, and they already hold $20B+ in venture funding. They design electronics in-house without entrenched process and can't staff it: 3,000 open hardware-engineering roles.

2. 2

   The pie is growing, not just the tooling. Canva did not take share from designers; it made millions of non-designers into people who make design work. The same shift is starting here: one pilot user has already put coscope in front of his mechanical-engineering intern, who is now doing EE work he could not have done alone.

3. 3

   The incumbents are busy consolidating. Over $40B of EDA M&A since 2024: Synopsys-Ansys $35B, Cadence-Hexagon €2.7B, Renesas-Altium $5.9B (~22× revenue). Their energy is going into integration and seat repricing, not new workflows.

4. 4

   Capital has validated the adjacent layer. $100M+ has gone into AI tools for board design (Quilter $40M, Flux $49M), all of it aimed at the schematic and PCB-layout stage. None of them carry context across the rest of the workflow.

5. 5

   Investors have seen the market. They haven't seen the team. A €80M European pre-seed fund has looked at many PCB and hardware design companies and invested in none of them: "right market, wrong teams so far." They called the workflow focus "differentiated vs the prompt-to-hardware approaches we've seen."

09 - Competition

Everyone else owns one artifact.

Field check: a pilot user tried Flux.ai on a comparable board and called it "embarrassingly bad"; another's fab (JLC) caught a real error Flux's DRC missed, and Flux crashes loading his ~130-component board.

Nothing here asks a team to switch CAD tools. Every attempt to replace the incumbent has died on the same wall: the file format, the library, and years of a layout engineer's muscle memory are all sunk cost, and nobody moves a live board onto a new tool to trial it. coscope sits above whatever is already installed, so the cost of adoption is an install script rather than a migration.

coscope carries the whole loop: design files, firmware and bench instruments, one agent, any vendor's hardware. Everyone else picks one artifact and stops at its edges.

Why a better model doesn't erase this: same model, different harness. Component-by-component checking caught 100% of injected errors where naive prompting caught 5-10%. Every session also becomes structured design-vs-reality data: what was designed, what the board actually did, and what fixed it. Nobody else in the industry is capturing that record.

10 - The ask

€500k pre-seed round: rolling SAFE, first close October 2026.

6 months of runway to the seed bar: 3+ paying design partners at 5-figure ARR and a closed loop from schematic to running application. No VC round is planned; if one follows the seed benchmark it will be a bigger number on better terms.

The money buys compute and distribution.

Non-dilutive leverage: German R&D grants recover up to 50% of engineering spend from year two, stretching this round without touching the cap table.

By the seed: 3+ paying design partners · 3+ published reference builds

If the reasoning stops living in one person's head, hardware teams stop being limited to the number of engineers they were able to hire. coscope lets a hardware team scale at the push of a button.

Appendix - Source register

Every number on these slides, sourced.