Circuit Mind raises $25M to bring AI agents to circuit board design
The London company combines AI agents with a physics-based engine to turn block diagrams into schematics and check designs before prototypes are built. It also launched a new verification product.
Circuit Mind, a London startup that uses AI to design and verify circuit boards, has announced $25 million in new financing, bringing its total funding to $33.4 million. According to the company's announcement of 28 October, the money includes an $18.5 million Series A led by Norwest and a previously unannounced seed round led by Third Prime.
Existing investors Third Prime, Differential and Blackhorn joined the Series A, along with new investor Lightscape VC. Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest, joins the board, as SiliconANGLE also reports.
What Circuit Mind does
Designing the electronics inside a product is still a slow, manual job. According to the company, engineers pick hundreds of components from millions of options, read datasheets that run to thousands of pages, run simulations and draw schematics by hand. Many errors are only found once boards are manufactured and tested, which can add months and several design rounds.
Circuit Mind's platform combines agentic AI with a patented, physics-based decision engine, machine-readable models of electronic components and each customer's own engineering rules, such as approved manufacturers and preferred parts. It plugs into the ECAD tools, libraries and PLM systems teams already use, the announcement says.
Two products: ACE and AVE
The first application, ACE (Assistant to Circuit Engineers), turns a hardware block diagram into a schematic, a bill of materials and supporting analysis in minutes, and offers design options optimised for cost, size, power or supply chain availability.
The second, AVE (Agentic Verification Engine), launched on 28 October. It uses AI agents to check designs against component datasheets and a company's own design rules, so that problems can be caught before a prototype is built. SiliconANGLE describes the launch as putting AI agents to work on checking schematics.
"Software teams are shipping 100 times faster with AI, but electronics design hasn't changed in 40 years," said Tomide Adesanmi, co-founder and CEO of Circuit Mind.
Customers and results
Engineering teams at Emerson, Schneider Electric and Fortune 5 companies already work with Circuit Mind, according to the company. It says customers use it to cut design time from months to weeks, reduce bill of materials cost by 25% and avoid respins that can delay projects by more than a month. In a peer-reviewed case study, engineers from Los Alamos National Laboratory completed a design in four hours that would otherwise have taken two weeks.
Daniel Gheno, SVP Innovation and Technology and CTO Energy Management at Schneider Electric, said early evaluations indicate the potential to reduce architecture exploration effort by more than 90%. These are company and customer figures and have not been independently verified.
Why investors are backing it
"Electronics design is one of the most complex and consequential engineering workflows, yet much of the process remains manual and time-consuming," said Dave Zilberman of Norwest. He said the company combines AI with physics-based models and that its founders are well placed to lead the category. Norwest sets out its reasoning in a blog post on the investment.
The new money will be used to expand the platform across the full electronics design lifecycle, grow sales, engineering and customer success teams, and set up a US headquarters for the North American market. The Next Web also covered the round. The company was founded by Tomide Adesanmi and Basilio Gentile and is also backed by Episode 1.
Circuit Mind will show its platform at Electronica 2026 in Munich from 10 to 13 November, at booth B5.565.
What it means for European founders and investors
Most of the AI coding boom has been about software. Circuit Mind is part of a smaller group of European startups applying AI to hardware engineering, where mistakes are expensive and general-purpose language models struggle with accuracy. Its approach of pairing AI agents with physics-based models and a customer's own rules is an answer to that accuracy problem.
The round also follows a familiar pattern for UK deep tech: a US lead investor and a plan to open a US headquarters soon after the Series A. For European founders, this shows both the pull of the US market and the value of enterprise customers in aerospace, defence and industry as early proof points.
For more on European AI and hardware, see our AI and tech page, including Machenta's $40M seed round for robots and ASM International's record quarter.
Spotted an error? Email contact@europreneursmedia.com and we'll correct it. See our corrections policy and editorial standards.
