CircuitHub has successfully raised $28 million in a Series A funding round aimed at scaling its software-defined factory model across Europe and North America. This marks the largest funding milestone in the company’s history.
The round was led by Plurala, a London-based operator-led venture capital firm started by a team of European tech heavyweights: Taavet Hinrikus, Sten Tamkivi, Ian Hogarth, and Khaled Helioui. The funds will be used to scale quickly additional modular manufacturing capacity, grow the CircuitHub cross-Atlantic engineering team, and extend the company’s software platform to deliver a full-service electronics manufacturing platform.
Rewriting the Economics of Small-Batch Electronics
A Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is the backbone of almost every modern implementation, from cell phones to spacecrafts. Yet the old Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) business remains highly optimised for stiff, high-volume mass production.
Industry data cited by CircuitHub suggests that about 95% of all electronic projects are for orders of less than 10,000 units. The demand for small-to-mid-batch production has always been enormous, but the hardware developers have had an uphill fight.
For traditional Western supply chains, this translates into commodity-driven, slow, manual quoting and labour-intensive assembly, extending iteration cycles to several months. Meanwhile, startups must look offshore, with the focus of critical supply chain components in heavily concentrated Asian hubs, a major weakness following the recent rise in geopolitical turmoil and global maritime transportation delays.
Source: Unsplash
Founded by Andrew Seddon, Rehno Lindeque, and Jon Friedman, CircuitHub addresses this imbalance by treating hardware manufacturing the way cloud providers treat computing power. Through an intuitive web browser platform, engineers can instantly upload complex design files, configure layouts, check shared part inventories, and initiate production in seconds. CircuitHub’s software takes over from there, compressing traditional months-long manufacturing timelines down into just a few days.
More News: Variational Raises $50M to Power Crypto Derivatives
The Grid: Semiconductor-Style Automation
At the absolute centre of CircuitHub’s operational model is the Grid, a standardised, 5,000-square-foot automated factory module. Inspired by the hyper-automated design of semiconductor fabrication plants, each Grid leverages advanced robotics, proprietary manufacturing software, and computer vision AI systems to handle component placement and quality control.
The major breakthrough of the Grid lies in its flexible output capacity. A single facility can seamlessly execute high-mix manufacturing, producing a one-off custom prototype side-by-side with commercial batches of up to 10,000 units across dozens of entirely different designs simultaneously.
By removing human error and minimising mechanical retooling delays, the platform makes localised, low-volume production highly cost-competitive against traditional massive overseas factories.
“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,” said Andrew Seddon, CEO of CircuitHub. “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.”
Driving Onshore Reshoring and Physical AI
CircuitHub’s dual-Atlantic presence positions it uniquely within a global market on track to surpass $1 trillion in value. While the company maintains its deep research and development roots in Cambridge, where it plans to hire up to 100 new R&D roles over the next two years, its initial commercial Grid facility operates out of Massachusetts to stay close to domestic North American customers.
The strategy has proven highly effective. To date, CircuitHub has delivered more than 2 million circuit boards and placed over 133 million components for roughly 20,000 engineers worldwide. The platform’s client base spans highly demanding sectors, including autonomous vehicles, aerospace, defence, robotics, and clean energy systems.
With Plural’s backing, CircuitHub intends to launch its first European Grid module, transforming the startup into a major dual-continent automated electronics network. Investors view this as a vital step toward protecting supply chains against unforeseen global disruptions.
“Andrew and the world-class CircuitHub team are changing the unit economics of the entire industry,” noted Sten Tamkivi, partner at Plural. “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.”
