We're excited to share that Trace has been backed by Founders, Inc (f.inc).
f.inc backs bold founders building at the frontier — primarily in hardware, AI, and deep tech. Their support validates what we've been building: that hardware design is ready for the same kind of AI-native tooling that's transformed software.
The last five weeks building at Artifact, f.inc's in-person builder program at Fort Mason in San Francisco, were fundamental. Being surrounded by other hardware founders, having access to a hardware lab, and getting 1:1 time with partners who actually understand the space — it sharpened everything. The network of hardware startups we built there is something we'll carry forward.
This doesn't change what we're doing. It accelerates it. We're using this to move faster on the product, expand the team, and get Trace into the hands of more hardware teams.
We started Trace because PCB design is stuck in the past. The tools haven't meaningfully changed in decades. The workflows are manual. And the knowledge that makes a good design — the kind you can't find in any textbook — lives in the heads of engineers who are approaching retirement. It's a hard world to break into, and a hard world to move fast in even if you've been doing it for 20 years.
But we didn't just read about this problem — we watched it. We spent time sitting with hardware engineers while they designed PCBs. The pattern was the same every time. They'd be making progress in their EDA tool, then stop. Open Chrome. Search for a datasheet. Open another tab for a reference design. Another for component pricing. Another for an application note. Before long they'd have 15 browser tabs open, a PDF viewer, a calculator, and they'd completely lost track of where they were in the actual schematic. The real engineering kept getting interrupted by information logistics — hunting for pin mappings, cross-referencing voltage regulators, checking if a part was even in stock.
And it's not the same problem for everyone. Experienced engineers — the ones who already know how to design — they want to move faster. They want AI-powered design review that catches mistakes before they go to fab. They want supply chain awareness baked into the tool so they're not picking components that are out of stock or EOL. They want to focus on the hard architectural decisions, not the repetitive stuff they've done a thousand times. Newcomers have a completely different problem: they can't even get started. The learning curve is brutal, the tools are hostile, and the tribal knowledge that separates a working board from a broken one isn't written down anywhere. Most of them look at the barrier and choose software instead.
Trace is for both. We put it in front of engineers and the reaction was immediate. The experienced ones told us it was an order of magnitude faster — not because the AI was doing the thinking for them, but because it eliminated all the context switching. Datasheets, component data, design rules — right there in the design environment. They could stay in flow. The newer engineers told us something different: for the first time, they could actually build something without needing years of accumulated knowledge first. The AI filled in the gaps they didn't know existed.
That was the validation we needed. Not a market report — watching real engineers go from fragmented, multi-tab chaos to focused, uninterrupted design work. What used to take weeks now takes hours.
We'll be honest: Trace isn't where it needs to be yet for someone who's never touched a PCB before. The experience for complete beginners is still rough. But that's the goal — to make hardware creation accessible to anyone with an idea, not just the people who already spent a decade learning the tools. Democratizing hardware design is a genuinely hard problem. It touches physics, manufacturing, supply chains, and decades of tribal knowledge all at once. But we've been living in this problem, and we believe we're the right team to solve it. We're just getting started.