- UK startup siliXon is building AI to design circuit boards using just prompts.
- The startup just raised $1.5 million in a round led by German early-stage investor System.One
- It also wants to help Europe reclaim its technology supply chain.
UK-based siliXon raised $1.5 million to design and prototype circuit boards using AI prompts, which cuts lengthy engineering processes to minutes.
German early-stage investor System.One led the round, which was the startup’s first, with participation from Helloworld VC and Antler.
Founded in 2024, the AI hardware design platform is building conversational prompt software that plugs into the manufacturing pipeline of printed circuit boards (PCB). It is designed to help engineers and non-traditional hardware builders solve the slow, manual, and inaccessible processes that currently exist in PCB design.
The funding comes amid a wave of AI-native tooling targeting technical disciplines — software development, data science, and now hardware engineering, each hoping for their own ChatGPT moment.
PCBs are used in just about all electronics, making them fundamental in the current tech and infrastructure boom. However, legacy design software and repetitive low-value engineering tasks continue to hold back progress.
The Cambridge-founded startup hopes to solve that by automating the full PCB design workflow with AI, from component selection and automatically-generated maps showing how components are connected to the documentation needed for manufacturing.
This would turn hardware design “from a specialist, multi-week engineering process into something that can be described in plain language and produced in minutes,” co-founder Mihai Mesteru tells Tech Funding News.
Mesteru brings hands-on hardware industry experience to the company and is its initial founder. Bach Nguyen, a software engineer and data scientist with a specialty in agentic AI, joined siliXon later.
The company counts the startup Flux and incumbents Altium Designer and KiCad as competitors. “Most [startup products] still assume the user is already a qualified electrical engineer and are also not built for rapid prototyping as they take far too long to design boards,” Mesteru says, adding that incumbent platforms still require years of training to use.
“No company has fully demonstrated a plain-English prompt to a manufactured, working board pipeline, without an experienced engineer in the loop,” he says.
“Our idea started as a passion project born from frustration with manual legacy design software. Like thousands of engineers, our core tools were stuck in the past and not able to leverage the potential of AI,” Mesteru adds.
Adam French, a partner at Antler, was drawn to the company over the founders’ “exceptional academic pedigree from Cambridge with practical industry experience in hardware and agentic AI.”
“They are tackling a massive and expanding market with a highly innovative platform that will empower engineers to move from concept to physical prototype in a fraction of the traditional time,” he says.
The fresh capital will be used ship the first public iteration of the product. SliXon’s open beta is expected at the end of May 2026. Currently a team of 2, the startup will be targeting a headcount of five within the next few months.
Long term, siliXon wants to help bring technological innovation back to Europe. “East Asia currently dominates electronics, with Shenzhen alone manufacturing about 90% of the world’s supply. Europe has immense talent; it must decouple from this reliance and start becoming self-sufficient,” Mesteru adds.
