Mechanical Engineer

CircuitHub raises $28m to scale automated PCB factories. CircuitHub, an automated electronics manufacturing company that provides on-demand prototyping and scaled production of printed circuit boards, has raised $28m in funding led by Plural, an early-stage investment fund. The funding will accelerate the expansion of CircuitHub's automated factories across Europe and the US, grow its engineering team and extend the platform into full-service electronics manufacturing. Founded by CEO Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub has built the first-of-its-kind automated electronics manufacturing system that turns design files into printed, production-ready circuit boards in days. While CircuitHub launched its first facility in Massachusetts to be close to early customers, its R&D roots are in Cambridge, UK, with an expanding team across London and it's preparing for a broader European manufacturing footprint. CircuitHub's customers can upload designs and order circuit boards in seconds, via CircuitHub's online platform. From there, the company uses automated robotics, computer vision and AI to assemble these designs at its first 5,000-square-foot factory, the Grid, before shipping them. By automating large parts of the production process and monitoring quality via a small on-site team, CircuitHub's Grid can produce a single prototype or batches of 10,000 units across dozens of different designs simultaneously. "Today, hardware companies face a tough choice: either spin up their own vertically integrated manufacturing from scratch, or rely on a legacy Western supply chain that's been decaying for years, Seddon said in a statement. "CircuitHub is the alternative: providing remote access to a cutting-edge factory through your browser or your AI agent. Just as software companies share cloud compute, hardware companies can now share our Grid." Around 95 per cent of electronics projects today involve fewer than 10,000 units, but industry remains optimised almost entirely for mass production. For most hardware teams, manufacturing involves manual assembly, supply chain bottlenecks and rising labour costs, while iteration cycles can extend into months. Furthermore, critical supply chains are heavily concentrated in China, creating dependencies that are increasingly exposed to geopolitical tensions and disruption. The US alone has lost more than 85 per cent of its share of the global PCB market to lower-cost overseas manufacturers. The ability to design, test and manufacture electronics quickly and locally has become a commercial and strategic imperative, along with a significant market opportunity as electronics manufacturing services are on track to hit $1 trillion. Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural, said: "What CircuitHub is doing is fundamental. Andrew and the world-class CircuitHub team are changing the unit economics of the entire industry. As robotics, AI and advanced hardware accelerate, their combination of automation, software and data is making electronics manufacturing as fast, flexible, and accessible as writing code. This is also about resilience and sovereignty, ensuring that Europe and the US can design, build and iterate on critical technologies locally. It's the kind of infrastructure shift that creates billion-dollar outcomes and will supercharge progress across physical AI, from robotics to space, energy and defence."

CircuitHub's software-defined manufacturing model can help engineers designing satellites, robotics and autonomous systems move from design to production-ready boards in days.