Deep tech startup Itera today emerged from stealth with a prototype of the world’s first fluid circuit board, enabling engineers to test and modify electronic designs using real components in real time. The company also announced $12M in seed funding from Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital to launch their first product and bring it to market.
Traditional printed circuit board (PCB) prototyping cycles force engineers to wait two to six weeks per design iteration, costing hundreds of thousands to millions in burn for a single hardware team and contributing to an estimated $50 billion of direct spending on electronics development annually. Itera’s patented technology eliminates this bottleneck by using a novel architecture of glass and liquid metal, allowing circuit rewiring in less than a minute.
“Software developers have been able to write code, test, and iterate in real time for decades. Itera makes real-time design and iteration possible for hardware too,” said AJ Cooper, CEO and Co-founder of Itera. “Hardware has always been hard because it is permanent. Changing it requires time and money. Itera is making hardware easy. For the first time ever, an engineer can change a circuit and test it again before their coffee gets cold.”
Unlike simulation software, which cannot replicate real-world component behavior, Itera’s fluid circuit board is actual components with real electrical behavior. Even more importantly, engineers can probe any internal circuit node, not just exposed test points, offering signal visibility that traditional PCB prototypes cannot match. The end product is iteration cycles that are up to 1,000x faster, compressing months of development into days.
Itera operates through an Electronics-as-a-Service model: customers’ designs are assembled using their actual components on Itera’s multilayer substrates at secure, U.S.-based testing centers. Customers change and test their hardware and software from anywhere until they have a validated design ready to go to manufacturing. Itera is uniquely positioned as the only source of actual electronic performance data, allowing companies to build better products faster with greater confidence. Amid growing government and enterprise focus on domestic manufacturing and ongoing supply chain disruptions, Itera is well equipped to meet the testing and development needs of reshoring initiatives and data sovereignty.
“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,” said Mark Suster, Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures. “Itera brings an AWS-like solution to testing hardware and this can dramatically lower costs for startups and incumbents alike.”
The company’s initial production capacity is already reserved by a top 5 global automotive OEM and defense neoprimes, while a leading hyperscaler and multiple chipset manufacturers are actively evaluating the technology with hands-on demonstrations.
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About Itera
Itera is the only company enabling engineers to test real hardware changes in seconds instead of weeks through breakthrough fluid circuit technology. Itera’s technology uses liquid metal substrates that can be modified in under 60 seconds while providing complete circuit visibility impossible with traditional prototypes, dramatically reducing the $50B that companies spend on electronics development annually. The company’s mission is to bring software-speed iteration to hardware development, transforming months of waiting into moments of discovery and accelerating the pace of electronic innovation. For more information, visit itera.co.
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