The funding is intended to help Quilter eliminate manual PCB design, a trillion-dollar bottleneck affecting products from phones to fighter jets.
LOS ANGELES—Quilter, claiming to be “the first and only company to publicly demonstrate fully autonomous PCB layout through physics-driven AI,” recently reported it secured $25 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures.
The investment comes as Fortune 500 aerospace, defense, and consumer electronics companies—representing a $500 billion market capitalization—are rapidly adopting Quilter’s technology to transform how their engineering teams design, test, and validate hardware, the company said in a release.
Printed circuit board layout sits on the critical path of every hardware project: It can’t begin until mechanical design and schematics are locked, and can’t be parallelized across teams. Demand has outpaced global engineering capacity, while original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier-1 suppliers face continued pressure to accelerate product development and reduce costs.
Quilter said it is cutting weeks of PCB design work down to minutes, unlocking a new pace of innovation.
“In five years, designing a PCB manually will feel like compiling code by hand,” said Sergiy Nesterenko, CEO and founder of Quilter, in the release. “Our customers are starting to view board design as instant and unlimited, making it inexpensive to test ideas and speeding up innovation.”
According to Quilter, existing automation tools don’t understand physics. They produce designs requiring extensive manual cleanup, thereby negating any promised time savings.
“Quilter is not an auto router, not a co-pilot, not an LLM,” the company said in the release. “It’s complete automation that turns PCB design into a self-serve task.”
By contrast, Quilter is building a reinforcement learning system, trained on fundamental physics rather than human patterns. By training in first-principle physics, Quilter is focused on eliminating human errors by quantifying the electromagnetic and thermal effects that can ruin a board design. Their goal is to eventually train this system to produce better PCB designs than any human has ever achieved.
“We built Quilter from first principles, training our AI on the fundamental physics of electronics—electromagnetic behavior, thermodynamics, signal propagation,” said Nesterenko. “This approach lets us discover optimal solutions that have never been tried before. When you start from physics rather than patterns, you can achieve designs that surpass what any human has created.”
Early adopters
Leading aerospace contractors, national defense laboratories, and consumer electronics giants have quietly integrated Quilter into their development cycles, according to the release.
Leading defense contractors are using Quilter-designed boards in spaceflight qualification tests, where precision and reliability are critical. A global Tier-1 automotive is using Quilter to slash test board iteration cycles from weeks to days for designs approaching production qualification. A leading electronics distributor completed board sizing studies in a matter of hours using Quilter. These high-stakes industries are able to save significant time and manual labor.
“What excites us about Quilter isn’t just the scale of the opportunity, but Sergiy’s ability to see it so clearly,” said Index Ventures Partner Nina Achadjian, who is joining Quilter’s board as part of the investment. “By applying reinforcement learning from first principles, Sergiy and his team are delivering a step-change in hardware design. We believe this is a generational opportunity to redefine electronics innovation across some of the most important industries of our time.”
Quilter is reported to “fit seamlessly into existing enterprise workflows with minimal disruption.”
“Teams continue using their existing tools—Altium Designer, Cadence Allegro/OrCAD, or Siemens Xpedition—while Quilter accelerates placement and layout velocity,” the release stated. “The company is rapidly expanding integrations across the entire hardware development stack, ensuring teams can adopt AI-powered design without changing their established processes.”
Beyond the companies already deploying Quilter, the company is reported to be engaged with OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers representing over $8 trillion in combined market value. “This monumental demand signals PCB design automation has reached an inflection point where adoption is no longer optional for competitive hardware development,” the company said.
“Quilter can make our control boards for an inverter, and we will be three months earlier on the market,” said a senior engineering manager at a global Tier-1 automotive supplier, responsible for technology scouting and digitalization initiatives aimed at accelerating product development.
“Then this is a big advantage that cannot be simply justified by only a cost comparison of the hours that the engineers would have taken to realize that, because it could decide if we get a billion-dollar contract or not.”
The Series B funding is expected to accelerate Quilter’s growth in top aerospace and defense, automotive, and consumer electronics firms “as it becomes clear that automating PCB design will be a competitive advantage in the $1 trillion hardware industry,” the company said.