Itera: Hardware Development at Software Velocity

For decades, hardware engineering has operated under a constraint that feels almost medieval by comparison to software development. Design something, send it to a fab, wait weeks, test it physically, find a problem, and start the entire cycle over. Months of iteration. Millions burned per cycle.

Meanwhile, on the software side of the building? Developers iterate in minutes. They ship, measure, learn, and ship again. The velocity gap between hardware and software has only widened as software has become increasingly central to every product on earth.

This is the problem Itera just solved.

The Bottleneck

The root cause is simple but brutal: PCBs are permanent. Once fabricated, you can't easily change them. So every design iteration requires a new board—new time, new cost, new risk. For a startup burning runway, this is existential. For an enterprise trying to move fast, it's a competitive liability. The industry estimates $50 billion annually spent on electronics development, much of it wasted in repetitive fabrication cycles.

Traditional simulation software promised a solution, but it has a fundamental flaw: it can't replicate real-world component behavior. You can't probe internal nodes. You can't test with actual electrical characteristics. The gap between simulation and reality has always been wide enough to trap surprises.

The Solution

Itera's breakthrough is elegant: a first-of-its-kind fluid circuit board that rewires itself in seconds using liquid metal technology. Engineers can now test real components, probe any internal node, and validate their design—all in the time it takes to get a fresh cup of coffee.

No new fabrication. No guessing games. Real speed.

→ For startups: Conserve runway. Iterate without burning cash on endless fab cycles.
→ For enterprises: Compress months of development into weeks. Outpace competitors.
→ For engineers: 1000x faster iteration cycles. That's not hyperbole—that's their actual performance.

Why We're Excited

The team—led by AJ Cooper, Alex Withrow, and Mattis Fjällström—is building this the right way. They've already locked in customers from the top 5 automotive OEMs and defense contractors. They're U.S.-based, focused on data sovereignty, and positioned at the intersection of reshoring and supply chain resilience.

At scale, this reshapes everything: automotive, defense, consumer electronics, IoT. Any company building hardware just got faster.

We're thrilled to partner with Itera on their mission to bring software-speed iteration to hardware development. The pace of innovation just accelerated.