UPDATED 08:00 EDT / OCTOBER 28 2026
Circuit Mind lands $25M and puts AI agents to work checking circuit board schematics
by Duncan Riley
British circuit board design startup Circuit Mind Ltd. today announced it has raised $25 million in new funding to extend its artificial intelligence platform across more of the hardware design process.
A verification tool that puts AI agents to work hunting for errors in schematics launched at the same time.
Circuit Mind offers software that automates much of the manual work behind printed circuit board design. Engineers can spend more than a year on a new piece of hardware, according to the company, some of it reading datasheets that run to thousands of pages. Mistakes often stay hidden until a prototype is physically built and tested.
In the company’s view, general-purpose large language models are not up to the task on their own, since they have never been trained on professionally designed circuits. Circuit Mind’s platform layers AI agents over a patented, physics-based engine that tests each design decision against electrical limits.
The agents work from the company’s own machine-readable models of electronic components. Each customer’s engineering rules feed in as well, down to its list of approved manufacturers.
The platform’s original application turns a hardware block diagram into a schematic, a bill of materials and supporting analysis in minutes. Engineers get several options back to compare, each optimized for a priority such as cost or power. Finished designs export straight into the electronic computer-aided design software their teams already use.
With the Agentic Verification Engine launched today, Circuit Mind is going after design review. AVE hands that work to a swarm of AI agents. Working from component datasheets and any review checklists a customer has loaded in, they trace every connection and bus in the circuit for mismatches with pin tables or operating voltages. Nothing reaches an engineer until the system has critiqued its own findings.
Most of the customer results Circuit Mind cites involve the design application. Engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory finished a medium-difficulty board in just over four hours using it, against an estimated 60 to 80 hours by hand, a report the lab cleared for public release shows.
At Schneider Electric SE, early evaluations point to a cut of more than 90% in the effort spent exploring electronic architectures, said Daniel Gheno, its chief technology officer for energy management. Several Fortune 5 companies are customers too. Circuit Mind says users have brought bill of materials costs down by 25%.
Charlie Eastberg, director of hardware engineering in the process systems and solutions business at Emerson Electric Co., said both of Circuit Mind’s applications have sped up his team’s move from system architecture to schematic. The tools have also improved “design validation and review coverage,” he said.
Electronics design “hasn’t changed in 40 years,” Circuit Mind co-founder and Chief Executive Tomide Adesanmi said, even as AI has let software teams ship far faster. He pitched the company as hardware’s answer to coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code.
Circuit Mind plans to use the funding to push the platform into further stages of the design lifecycle, including testing and firmware. Its sales, engineering and customer success teams will grow as well, and the company is setting up a U.S. headquarters to serve customers in North America.
The $25 million is made up of two rounds. Norwest Venture Partners led an $18.5 million Series A round in which new investor Lightscape Partners and existing backers Third Prime, Differential Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures took part. The rest comes from a seed round, previously unannounced, that Third Prime led. Dave Zilberman, a general partner at Norwest, will join Circuit Mind’s board as part of the deal.
Zilberman said the pairing of AI with physics-based models could “fundamentally improve how engineers design electronics.”
AVE is available now through Circuit Mind’s website. Adesanmi founded the company in London in 2018 with Chief Technology Officer Basilio Gentile. Including the new funding, its backers have now put $33.4 million into the business.
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