CopperPilot, a startup building an AI agent that designs electronic circuit boards, has raised $390,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Neon Fund, with participation from US-based angel investors.
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The startup announced the round along with the launch of the first version of its design agent, codenamed Epsilon, which is now open to hardware engineers.
The funding will be used to strengthen product research and engineering, improve the agent’s speed, intelligence and reliability, and expand the startup’s engineering team in the coming months.
CopperPilot said its weekly active users have grown 25-fold since August 2026, and that more than 6,000 design tasks, which it calls artefacts, have been run on the platform so far.
Designing the electronics for a hardware product is still largely manual work. Engineers read component datasheets, choose parts, draw schematics and route the connections on a printed circuit board (PCB). A mistake found after the boards are made means a costly redesign, known in the industry as a re-spin.
CopperPilot said product development guides estimate that the electronics work alone, from schematic to ordering the first prototype boards, takes roughly 6-15 weeks and costs $7,500-30,000. The startup claims its agent can bring this down to hours.
The agent takes a plain-English description of what an engineer wants and turns it into a manufacturing-ready board design. According to the startup, it researches requirements, selects components, draws schematics, places and routes the board, and checks its own work for electrical and design-rule errors.
It works inside the software engineers already use, starting with the open-source tool KiCad, with early support for Altium and LTspice. It also plugs into AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, so developers can hand board design to it from within those tools.
Co-founder and CEO Aditya NG said the agent is built to catch errors that standard checks miss.
“While connecting two computers or two microcontrollers over a serial connection, you are supposed to connect the transmitter of one device to the receiver of the other, and the receiver of the first device to the transmitter of the other. It is very easy to reverse these connections, and it happens to many engineers,” he told EE Times.
“With CopperPilot, we have internally built out our own harness, benchmarks, and tooling to validate the design,” he added.
The startup said Epsilon designed an eight-layer PCB for a Raspberry Pi AI camera in about 30 minutes. It has also designed NVIDIA Jetson motherboards and drone circuit boards for manufacturing.
In the startup’s own tests across 49 test cases, the base language model on its own scored 18.6%, against 78% when paired with Epsilon.
The team also publishes a new open-source board design every day on LinkedIn, which anyone can inspect in KiCad. About 30 have been published so far.
Founded in October 2025 by Aditya NG, Mohit Bagur and Anish Harsha, CopperPilot is led by Aditya as CEO and Harsha as COO, while Bagur oversees the company’s business operations.
The founders spent about a year after starting the startup drawing on their experience in autonomous vehicles, quantum photonics and robotics to build and benchmark the agent. Aditya worked on autonomous vehicle projects at Purdue University and at Minus Zero.
“On almost every autonomous vehicle team I worked with, someone would eventually say: a compute unit for six cameras is too hard to design, or a drive-by-wire unit is too much for us. Many teams stopped right there. The ones that kept going spent months staring at datasheets and paying for mistakes on board re-spins,” Aditya said.
“I built CopperPilot so that no hardware team is ever blocked because a board is too hard to design. Today it designs an AI camera board in about 30 minutes. I started out designing the electronics for a student race car. The racecars of the future will be designed with CopperPilot,” he added.
The US-based startup also has a team in Bengaluru. According to the startup, it has paying customers across the US, UK and Europe, along with users in India and other markets.
It sells on a software-as-a-service model, with a free Starter plan, paid Pro, Pro Plus and Ultra plans for individuals, and paid team and enterprise plans. Its customers range from individual engineers and startups to design service providers and larger enterprises.
One customer is Dexory, a UK-based company that builds AI-powered warehouse robots. Dexory started in 2015 as BotsAndUs and raised a $165 million Series C in October 2025.
“Robotics companies live and die by how fast they can iterate on hardware and drive continuous improvements. Tools like CopperPilot point to a future where that loop is measured in days, not months,” said Andrei Danescu, co-founder and CEO of Dexory.
Neon Fund is an early-stage investor in B2B software startups. Its third fund, of $25 million, backs B2B SaaS startups using AI, with typical cheques of $500,000 to $1 million. Its portfolio includes Airmeet, CloudSek, SpotDraft, Astra Security and Highperformr.
“AI coding agents have changed how software gets built. Hardware has been left behind, still slowed by datasheets, manual layout and costly re-spins. Aditya, Anish and Mohit have lived at the intersection of AI and hardware, and CopperPilot already turns a plain-English idea into a manufacturing-ready design,” said Siddhartha Ahluwalia, managing partner at Neon Fund.
“We think this is how the next generation of hardware will be built,” he added.
The founders expect consumer electronics, renewables and energy storage, robotics and IoT, and automotive and electric vehicles to gain the most from the agent. CopperPilot is targeting the electronic design automation (EDA) software market, which the startup puts at $20.93 billion.
