Welcome back to The Prompt.

When Sergiy Nesterenko joined SpaceX as an intern, a technical error caused a circuit board he’d designed to catch fire in his hands. In his role working on rockets like Falcon 9, he realized just how cumbersome and labor intensive it is to design printed circuit boards— key hardware components that power every electronic device from phones to LED light bulbs to fighter jets.

Conventionally, designing these tiny green squares of metal involves using a mouse and keyboard to tediously draw thousands of wires and connections before sending a digital layout to a manufacturer for production. The entire process can take up to three months, in part because of its error-prone nature. “Usually you find out you screwed up somehow and then you repeat,” Nesterenko told Forbes.

So in September 2019, he started Quilter to use artificial intelligence to accelerate designing electronics. A human designer feeds the software a rough sketch, and then AI gets to work finalizing it and adding in the details. “The website does it all automatically and then in a much faster time returns a result which they can then inspect, review and modify,” said Nesterenko.

The Los Angeles-based startup announced today it has raised $25.5 million in Series B investment led by Index Ventures. Quilter is valued at around $200 million, according to a person familiar with the round.

One key differentiator for its AI is the training data: Instead of learning from human designs, which are often ridden with mistakes, Quilter uses the laws of physics —the ABCs of how heat moves or signals travel— to teach its AI program how to correctly design boards, using reinforcement learning to improve its performance. Nesterenko claims Quilter doesn’t use any external large language models under the hood.

Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, said the world is experiencing a type of “hardware renaissance,” with more pressure from the Trump administration to manufacture electronics in the U.S. That’s created demand–and increased costs. Nesterenko said human designers cost around $100 an hour and many are reaching retirement age, which have created labor shortages and bottlenecks in the production process, creating an opportunity for Quilter.

Let’s get into the headlines.

BIG PLAYS

OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into the next internet. At its packed annual Dev Day in San Francisco, the company announced users will be able to directly use external apps like Spotify, Zillow, Coursera and Expedia through its........

© Forbes