You ever try building a rocket engine in a Google Doc? Yeah, neither have I. But hardware engineers have been forced to design the future with the same tools you use to draft your PTO request. That is, until AllSpice.io showed up and put some damn respect on hardware’s name.
Founded in 2020 by Valentina Ratner (CEO) and Kyle Dumont (CTO), AllSpice.io is the GitHub for hardware teams, minus the noise, plus the intelligence. And today, the San Francisco-Boston crew just locked down a $15 million Series A led by Rethink Impact, with strong backup from L’ATTITUDE Ventures, GingerBread Capital, DNX Ventures, and returning heat from Root Ventures, Benchstrength, and Flybridge. That brings total funding to $25 million. And they’ve earned every dime.
Let’s be real, hardware’s never had it easy. Layers of legacy tools pieced together like a Craigslist gaming rig from 2009. While software teams have been automating, versioning, and collaborating with finesse, hardware engineers have been trapped in a loop of exported PDFs and inbox ping-pong. AllSpice.io didn’t just see that problem, they lived it. Kyle Dumont’s time building systems at iRobot and Voxel8 wasn’t just engineering, it was battle-testing. Valentina Ratner was over at Amazon, managing infrastructure tools before chasing something a bit less bureaucratic and a whole lot bolder.
Now, they’re serving everyone from space cowboys at Blue Origin to deep-tech builders like Lumafield, Impulse Labs, and Tools for Humanity. Their platform lets teams plug in native ECAD files, version every change, visually review with automated diffing, and drop comments right where it hurts, in the lines that matter. It’s ECAD-agnostic, cloud native, AI-infused, and more collaborative than your last corporate offsite. Even launched their own AI Agent, currently in private beta, that catches design flaws before your prototype blows budget or blows up.
This isn’t a pivot. It’s a power move. The markets they play in, EDA, PCB design, and hardware development tools, are on a rocket ride to double-digit billions. The problems are real, the complexity is brutal, and AllSpice.io is serving up structure, speed, and sanity. They’re not asking hardware engineers to learn a new religion. They’re just handing them better tools.
So what can startups learn from this? Build the thing you wish existed when you were in the trenches. Talk to the pain. Design around the chaos. And for god’s sake, stop treating hardware like the afterthought in your software-first fantasy.
