CircuitHub Secures $28M for Automated Electronics Manufacturing Expansion

CircuitHub, a company dedicated to streamlining electronics production, has announced it has raised $28 million in funding. The investment, led by Plural, is earmarked to accelerate hardware development and manufacturing workflows, with a focus on expanding CircuitHub's automated factories across the US and Europe. The company also plans to grow its engineering team and extend its platform to offer full-service electronics manufacturing.

Founded by CEO Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub has developed a first-of-its-kind automated electronics manufacturing system. This system is capable of transforming design files into printed, production-ready circuit boards in a matter of days, a significant improvement over traditional cycles that could take months. The company's R&D roots are in Cambridge, UK, with a growing team in London forming the foundation for a broader European manufacturing footprint. CircuitHub launched its initial facility in Massachusetts to be close to early customers.

The Imperative for Sovereign Electronics Manufacturing Infrastructure

The current landscape of electronics production reveals a clear disconnect: approximately 95% of today's projects involve fewer than 10,000 units, yet the industry remains almost entirely optimized for mass production. For most hardware teams, manufacturing still resembles its 1990s counterpart, characterized by manual assembly, supply chain bottlenecks, and rising labor costs, with iteration cycles stretching into months. This inefficiency stifles innovation and increases operational expenditures.

Much of the world's manufacturing is overseas, with critical supply chains heavily concentrated in China. This dependency exposes companies and governments to increasing geopolitical tensions and disruptions. The US alone has lost over 85% of its share in the global PCB market to lower-cost overseas manufacturers. In response, US and European governments and companies are actively rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity, driven by these tensions, fragile supply chains, and the growing need for technological sovereignty. For those evaluating on-premise deployments, supply chain resilience is a critical factor, and initiatives like CircuitHub's offer a model for reducing external reliance.

Semiconductor-Style Automation for Electronics Manufacturing

CircuitHub has adopted an approach inspired by semiconductor fabs, which are among the most automated systems globally. Engineers developing self-driving cars, satellites, and other technologies can upload their designs and order circuit boards in seconds via CircuitHub's online platform. From there, the company utilizes automated robotics, computer vision, and AI to assemble these designs at its initial 5,000-square-foot factory, dubbed "The Grid," before shipping them to teams worldwide.

By automating large parts of the production process and monitoring quality via a small on-site team, CircuitHub's "The Grid" can produce a single prototype or batches of 10,000 units across dozens of different designs simultaneously. This not only shrinks production cycles from months to days, fueling innovation, but also makes "high-mix manufacturing" – where different designs are produced in small batches – economically viable in a world still built for mass production. Andrew Seddon, founder and CEO of CircuitHub, emphasized that the company offers an alternative to traditional supply chains, likening remote factory access to using cloud compute for software companies: "Just as software companies share cloud compute, hardware companies can now share our Grid."

Expansion and Impact on "Physical AI"

Since launching its first facility in Massachusetts, CircuitHub has delivered over 2 million boards and placed more than 133 million parts, serving 20,000 engineers across some of the world's largest and most innovative hardware teams. The company has become the fastest-growing electronics manufacturer in the US, and over time, CircuitHub aims to make its factories increasingly modular, allowing new capacity to be deployed wherever needed. This approach is particularly relevant for companies seeking to maintain control and sovereignty over their data and infrastructure, a central theme for on-premise LLM and AI deployments.

CircuitHub plans to expand its "Grid" model across the US and Europe, scaling high-speed, on-demand manufacturing to reduce reliance on distant supply chains and strengthen domestic control over critical technologies. Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural, highlighted how the CircuitHub team is changing the unit economics of the entire industry. He added that the combination of automation, software, and data is making electronics manufacturing "as fast, flexible, and accessible as writing code," contributing to resilience and sovereignty by ensuring that Europe and the US can design, build, and iterate on critical technologies locally. This type of infrastructural shift is crucial for advancing "physical AI," from robotics to space, energy, and defense.