Quilter, a Los Angeles-based company pioneering fully autonomous printed circuit board (PCB) design through physics-driven artificial intelligence, announced a $25 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures. The financing will accelerate Quilter’s commercial growth as it transforms PCB layout, which is the foundation of every hardware product, into a fully automated process.
The investment follows strong adoption among Fortune 500 aerospace, defense, and consumer electronics companies representing over $500 billion in market capitalization, all of which are integrating Quilter’s system to speed product development and reduce costs. The company’s technology is eliminating one of the most time-consuming bottlenecks in hardware engineering, cutting weeks of manual PCB layout work down to minutes.
PCB design is an indispensable step in the development of everything from smartphones to fighter jets. It sits at the critical junction between mechanical design and manufacturing, and until now, has required teams of engineers to lay out manually and route complex circuit boards. With global demand for electronics surging, companies are struggling to expand capacity quickly enough to keep pace. Quilter’s solution replaces this slow, manual process with an autonomous AI-driven design capable of completing layouts nearly instantly.
Unlike traditional electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which depend on user-defined rules and limited templates, Quilter’s physics-based reinforcement learning system is trained on the underlying principles of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. This allows the AI to anticipate and optimize for the electromagnetic, thermal, and signal propagation effects that determine the performance and reliability of a circuit board.
Major aerospace contractors are already using Quilter for spaceflight qualification tests, where precision and thermal stability are essential. A Tier-1 automotive manufacturer has reduced test board iteration cycles from weeks to days, while a global electronics distributor has completed board sizing studies in just hours using Quilter’s platform. The company has reached a pivotal moment, with engagements now underway with OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers representing more than $8 trillion in combined market value.
Quilter integrates seamlessly with industry-standard tools such as Altium Designer, Cadence Allegro/OrCAD, and Siemens Xpedition, allowing enterprises to accelerate their workflows without abandoning their existing systems. The company’s platform runs on private cloud, GovCloud, or on-premise deployments, meeting strict security and compliance requirements across industries, including defense, aerospace, and automotive.
The Series B funding will be used to expand Quilter’s presence across global defense, automotive, and consumer electronics sectors and to further refine its AI models to deliver even higher performance and reliability. With this round, Quilter has raised a total of $40 million from investors, including Index Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue, Root Ventures, and prominent industry veterans such as Lip-Bu Tan.
KEY QUOTES:
“In five years, designing a PCB manually will feel like compiling code by hand. Our customers are starting to view board design as instant and unlimited, making it inexpensive to test ideas and speeding up innovation.”
“We built Quilter from first principles, training our AI on the fundamental physics of electronics—electromagnetic behavior, thermodynamics, signal propagation. This approach lets us discover optimal solutions that have never been tried before. When you start from physics rather than patterns, you can achieve designs that surpass what any human has created.”
Sergiy Nesterenko, CEO and Founder, Quilter
“What excites us about Quilter isn’t just the scale of the opportunity, but Sergiy’s ability to see it so clearly. By applying reinforcement learning from first principles, Sergiy and his team are delivering a step-change in hardware design. We believe this is a generational opportunity to redefine electronics innovation across some of the most important industries of our time.”
Nina Achadjian, Partner, Index Ventures
“Quilter can make our control boards for an inverter, and we will be three months earlier on the market. Then this is a big advantage that cannot be simply justified by only a cost comparison of the hours that the engineers would have taken to realize that, because it could decide if we get a billion-dollar contract or not.”
Senior Engineering Manager, Global Tier-1 Automotive Supplier
