- San Francisco-based Itera has emerged from stealth with a $12 million seed round and a prototype of what it claims is the world’s first fluid circuit board, a system that rewires physical electronics in under 60 seconds.
- The company targets a $50 billion annual electronics development market where hardware engineers routinely wait two to six weeks between design iterations, a bottleneck that has not meaningfully changed in decades.
- The PCB prototyping services market was valued at $6.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $13.4 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 7.8% and Itera is betting it can own the segment before incumbents catch up.
In 2013, Dr. AJ Cooper co-founded a smartwatch company called Olio Devices. It raised $10.2 million, built a beautiful piece of hardware, and shut down in 2016 after selling around 5,000 units. The reason it struggled was not the product, it was the pace. Every circuit change meant weeks of waiting. Cooper spent a decade after that thinking about the bottleneck he could not outrun. Itera is his answer.
Cooper, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia who has led hardware teams at Uber’s Jump e-bike division, Flex, and Lyft, co-founded Itera in San Francisco in 2024 alongside Alex Withrow, whose background spans cloud infrastructure and systems engineering at Bridgewater Associates, VMware, and Heptio. Together they cover the full stack – Cooper on the deep hardware science, Withrow on the software and infrastructure layer that makes it remotely operable. The team of eight also draws on backgrounds from Applied Materials, Intel, Google, AWS, and Lockheed Martin.
Today Itera exits stealth with $12 million in seed funding and a prototype of what the company claims is the world’s first fluid circuit board – a system that lets engineers modify and retest physical electronic designs in under 60 seconds, replacing weeks-long PCB fabrication cycles with near-instant iteration.
What it does and why it matters now
Traditional PCB prototyping requires engineers to design a circuit, order a physical board, wait two to six weeks for fabrication and assembly, test it, discover problems, and start over. Each cycle costs hardware teams hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Cooper lived this at Olio and again at Uber and Lyft, where hardware iteration speed determined how fast entire city-scale mobility fleets could be improved. The problem, he concluded, was not engineering talent. It was physics: copper traces, once etched, cannot be changed.
Itera’s approach replaces those fixed copper traces with liquid metal alloys that flow across a glass substrate using electrowetting, electric fields that precisely redirect conductive liquid to form new circuit paths on demand. Engineers update a design digitally and the board rewires itself to match. The result, Itera claims, is iteration cycles up to 1,000 times faster than conventional prototyping. It is the kind of hardware-software convergence that TFN has been tracking across the AI-driven electronics design space, where startups are increasingly attacking the bottlenecks that have defined hardware development for decades.
Crucially, Itera’s platform is not simulation software. It uses real components with real electrical behaviour, allowing engineers to probe any internal circuit node – not just exposed test points – giving signal visibility that traditional prototypes cannot replicate. The company operates through an Electronics-as-a-Service model: customers send their designs to Itera’s secure, US-based testing centres, where they are assembled on Itera’s multilayer substrates and can be modified remotely until a validated design is ready for manufacturing.
The money
The $12 million seed round was led by Upfront Ventures, the Los Angeles-based firm that previously backed Ring (acquired by Amazon for over $1 billion) and GOAT, alongside Costanoa Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage B2B investor that TFN covered when it closed $394 million in two new funds, with a portfolio spanning Vannevar Labs, Demandbase, and Quizlet and Colle Capital, a New York-based deep tech fund. This is Itera’s first publicly disclosed funding round. All three investors are new.
Mark Suster, Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, said: “I’ve worked with hardware companies for 15 years and there have been almost no innovations in how to massively reduce the time to test and iterate physical PCB designs. Itera brings an AWS-like solution to testing hardware and this can dramatically lower costs for startups and incumbents alike.”
Cooper put it through the lens of his own experience: “For the first time ever, an engineer can change a circuit and test it again before their coffee gets cold.”
Early traction and customers
Itera’s initial production capacity is already reserved by a top-five global automotive OEM and defence neoprimes, while a leading hyperscaler and multiple chipset manufacturers are actively evaluating the technology. The company has not named these customers publicly. That a company of eight people with a prototype – not a shipped product – has secured capacity reservations from automotive and defence primes is itself the signal investors are betting on. It reflects a broader shift in how defence and industrial customers are engaging with deep tech startups, a trend TFN has documented in detail in its coverage of the full defence tech investment stack.
Competitors
Itera occupies a largely unchallenged position in reconfigurable physical prototyping, but competes adjacent to simulation platforms including Synopsys which acquired Ansys in July 2025, whose electronics simulation tools are used widely across hardware development, and Cadence Design Systems, whose PCB design software dominates the pre-fabrication stage. Neither offers physical, real-component testing at the speed Itera claims. Traditional rapid prototyping services such as PCBWay and JLCPCB reduce turnaround to days but still require fabrication, they do not eliminate the cycle. Itera’s differentiation is physical, not software-based.
The bigger question
Cooper spent more than a decade building hardware at every scale, a single smartwatch, an e-bike fleet, a city-wide mobility network and each time hit the same wall. The company he built to knock it down is eight people with a prototype and $12 million. Fluid circuit technology is unproven at commercial scale, and the gap between a working prototype and a manufacturing-grade platform is where most deep tech companies lose years and money. The real question is not whether faster hardware iteration is valuable, the reservations from automotive OEMs and defence primes confirm that it is. It is whether the physics of liquid metal at scale can deliver on what a decade of frustration promised.
