Berlin · Pre-seed · 2026
cscope
The agentic colleague for electrical engineers.
Design, build and validate hardware faster. Superpowers for component selection, schematic design, and board bring-up.
2 pilots scheduled, Aug–Sep 2026 · Raising €500k pre-seed
Tom Elliot · tom@coscope.ai
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01 - The problem
Every board revision burns the most expensive time in hardware.
$50,000
in scrapped boards
1 month
lost
15-20
engineers blocked
The cost of one unconnected power rail missed in schematic review.
Senior EE (ex-Meta, ex-Fitbit), discovery interview, July 2026
- • First-spin boards rarely work: teams plan for multiple respins per product. One audio company's 7 EEs ship 12-13 products a year through this cycle.
- • Each revision consumes 20-40 senior-EE hours at $150-300/hr on bring-up and debug.
- • Until the board is validated, all downstream firmware work stalls. Engineers wait weeks just to power on a board.
02 - The customer
Venture-backed robotics, drone, and aerospace companies building custom electronics with almost no EE bench.
1,416
robotics companies
3,000
open hardware-engineering roles
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 YC W26 robotics team is starting its first custom board with no EE on staff.
- • 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, never asks them to switch.
Not the customer: companies that outsource electronics design, and legacy automotive/industrial teams with entrenched process.
03 - The solution
coscope reverses the math on every board revision.
Bring-up to application in ~2 weeks instead of 2-3 months
The agent reads the design, drives console and debugger, and writes the firmware to exercise the board.
Design reviews that catch what rubber stamps miss
Schematic and layout checked component by component against datasheets: the class of error behind the $50k respin.
8 hours of constraint entry becomes minutes
Design intent (trace currents, voltage ranges, impedances) encoded into the CAD tool by the agent.
EEs stop waiting on firmware
Boards get validated the day they arrive, so downstream software work starts weeks earlier.
Works alongside Altium, KiCad, and Cadence. Nothing to rip out.
The method is proven: in a trillion-dollar tech company's internal evaluation, checking a schematic component by component against datasheets caught 100% of injected errors. Naive prompting caught 5-10%.
04 - Traction
Pull before product.
- • 2 pilots scheduled, Aug-Sep 2026: a YC W26 robotics company (verbal commitment to pay) and an autonomous-marine data platform.
- • 15 discovery interviews with senior EEs and engineering leaders across robotics, defense, consumer audio, and hardware consulting.
- • The demand already exists as workarounds. An aerospace Director of EE is hand-building his own datasheet chatbot; a trillion-dollar tech company funded internal tooling at VP level.
- • 4 LOI conversations in progress, targeting signed beta commitments before the round closes.
"Tell it what I want to make, give it requirements, have it spit out schematic and layout."
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.
The insight: AI-EDA startups build where software founders are comfortable: the design file. The expensive failures happen at the bench. coscope exists because I've carried the board from schematic to factory line, and the tools have big gaps that lead to costly mistakes.
06 - Business model
$1,200 per engineer per month.
Annual SaaS seat, sold to the engineering lead. Design partners get 50% pricing ($600/mo) locked for their first year.
Payback in one catch
A routine board revision burns $3k-12k of senior-EE time; the $50k respin from the problem slide would have paid for the seat for 3 years.
$72k/year per 5-EE team
And seats expand as the team hires (3,000 open roles in the segment).
3 design partners = the seed benchmark
Each at 2+ seats clears 5-figure ARR before the priced round.
07 - Market
$1.8B/year: what teams already pay to design PCBAs.
PCB design-software revenue, 2025, 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.
Beachhead
$40M ARR in venture-backed robotics
1,416 robotics companies worldwide (before drones and aerospace) × 2 EE seats × $14,400/year. 3,000 open hardware roles signal the segment's growth.
08 - Why now
New buyers, busy incumbents, and capital validating the adjacent layer.
-
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
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.
-
3
Capital has validated the adjacent layer. $100M+ has gone into AI tools for board design (Quilter $40M, Flux $49M). Every one of them starts long after the design process has begun and stops before the hardware is built.
09 - Competition
Everyone stops before the bench.
Design-AI startups
Quilter ($40M), Flux ($49M), Schematik
AI-assisted layout & schematic
Where they miss: no support on architecture and component selection. Never touch the physical board.
EDA incumbents
Cadence, Siemens, Altium/Renesas
Simulation + in-tool AI
Where they miss: no support on architecture and component selection. Never touch the physical board.
Instrument vendors
Keysight, R&S, Tektronix
Per-instrument AI features
Where they miss: no support on architecture and component selection. No support on design.
| Who | What they sell | Where they miss |
|---|---|---|
|
Design-AI startups: Quilter ($40M), Flux ($49M), Schematik |
AI-assisted layout & schematic |
No support on architecture and component
selection. Never touch the physical board. |
|
EDA incumbents: Cadence, Siemens, Altium/Renesas |
Simulation + in-tool AI |
No support on architecture and component
selection. Never touch the physical board. |
|
Instrument vendors: Keysight, R&S, Tektronix |
Per-instrument AI features |
No support on architecture and component
selection. No support on design. |
coscope closes the loop others can't: design files + firmware + bench instruments, one agent, any vendor's hardware.
Every bring-up session becomes structured design-vs-reality data: what was designed, what the board actually did, and what fixed it. Nobody else in the industry captures that record.
10 - The ask
€500k: rolling SAFE, closing now.
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.
20% product & AI compute
The agent does the engineering; we buy compute instead of headcount.
20% reference build program
A new board every month through the full loop, with the journal published end to end. Each build hardens the product and markets it at the same time.
20% pilot conversion & founder-led sales
2 scheduled pilots and 4 LOI conversations into paying design partners.
20% operations · 20% reserve
The reserve means the seed closes on our terms.
By the seed: 3+ paying design partners · 3+ published reference builds
Appendix - Source register
Every number on these slides, sourced.
- • Respin cost, constraint-entry hours, bring-up quotes: founder discovery interviews, 2026 (15 senior EEs and engineering leaders; robotics, defense, consumer audio, consulting).
- • Robotics segment: Robotics Registry (roboticsregistry.net), 2026. 1,416 companies, 3,000 open roles; global, robotics-only. Segment statistics (founding years, team sizes, funding stages/amounts): founder analysis of registry company-level data (n≈1,400; underlying funding rounds cite SEC filings and press per company).
- • PCB design-software market: ESD Alliance Electronic Design Market Data, published by SEMI. PCB & MCM segment, quarterly reports 2025 (~$1.78B FY2025).
- • Synopsys-Ansys ($34.9B, closed 17 Jul 2025): Synopsys press release / SEC Form 8-K.
- • Cadence-Hexagon D&E (€2.7B, announced Sep 2025, closed 23 Feb 2026): Cadence and Hexagon press releases.
- • Renesas-Altium (A$9.1B ≈ US$5.9B, closed 1 Aug 2024): Renesas and Altium press releases.
- • Quilter funding ($40M total; $25M Series B, Oct 2025): Business Wire.
- • Flux funding ($12M seed, TechCrunch 2021; $37M Series B, SiliconANGLE Feb 2026).
- • Injected-error evaluation (100% vs 5-10% detection): discovery interview with EE lead at a trillion-dollar tech company, 2026.