Norwest has led an $18.5 million Series A in Circuit Mind, a London startup that designs circuit boards with AI. The company also disclosed an earlier seed round led by Third Prime. Together, the two rounds bring in $25 million, Circuit Mind said on Wednesday.
Existing investors Third Prime, Differential and Blackhorn joined the Series A, along with new investor Lightscape VC. Dave Zilberman, a general partner at Norwest, joins Circuit Mind’s board.
“Software teams are shipping 100 times faster with AI, but electronics design hasn’t changed in 40 years.” Tomide Adesanmi, CEO, Circuit Mind
Adesanmi compared the plan to what AI coding tools have done for software. He named Cursor, Claude Code and Cognition.
From block diagram to schematic
Engineers designing a board choose hundreds of components, according to Circuit Mind. They read datasheets that can run to thousands of pages. Mistakes usually show up only once boards are made and tested, it said.
Its first product, ACE, turns a block diagram into a schematic and a parts list in minutes. It offers design options tuned for cost, size, power or supply chain availability, the company said.
The second, AVE, launched the same day. A group of AI agents checks schematics against datasheets and a company’s own design rules. Before reporting to the engineer, AVE reviews its own findings and drops the ones that do not hold up.
The platform combines AI agents with Circuit Mind’s patented, physics-based decision engine and each customer’s engineering rules. It works inside the design software teams already use.
Emerson and Schneider Electric
Engineering teams at Emerson, Schneider Electric and Fortune 5 companies already work with Circuit Mind, the company said. They have cut design time from months to weeks, it said. Parts costs fell by 25%.
Engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory finished one design in four hours instead of two weeks, the company said. That result comes from a peer-reviewed case study.
“Early evaluations indicate the potential to reduce architecture exploration effort by more than 90%.” Daniel Gheno, Schneider Electric
Circuit Mind will use the money to cover more of the design process, hire across sales, engineering and customer success, and open a US headquarters. Adesanmi founded the company with Basilio Gentile, its chief technology officer.