There is no shortage of workflow collaboration tools — like Slack or Google Docs, in addition to industry-specific ones like GitHub — for software developers. A startup called AllSpice successfully bet that electrical hardware engineering teams need their own collaboration platform, too.
AllSpice’s platform sits between existing workflow software. It allows hardware teams to collaborate on the types of documents they traditionally work in — documents that don’t easily translate over Slack and email — like PCB files and electronic CAD files, both of which are used to design circuit boards.
Engineers can use AllSpice to single out and comment on design aspects in these types of documents, the same way software engineers can comment on specific lines of code through GitHub.
Kyle Dumont, co-founder and CTO of AllSpice, told TechCrunch that the startup has been able to find success because they haven’t tried to build a new end-to-end collaboration platform but rather fill the gap between the software solutions that hardware teams were already using.
“The teams that we were talking to had really integral tools already in their workflows,” Dumont said. “They had these electrical CAD tools, they had [product life cycle management] tools, they had existing workflows that we knew the product that we launched had to operate between.”
This learning came from research the founding team did prior to launching their product to make sure that they were building something teams would actually use. In early tests, AllSpice not only focused on what their users commented on, both good and bad, but also what didn’t get mentioned at all, Valentina Ratner, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
“Some of the most valuable things that we learned were maybe the things that people didn’t need or didn’t want,” Ratner said. “That helped us kind of scope something that will be really helpful and really an integral part of the workflow. Because we wanted to build not another point solution for our space, but a centralized platform that will become that home base for electronics teams.”
Both Ratner and Dumont had experienced the pain points AllSpice is trying to solve firsthand while working as engineers at Amazon and iRobot, respectively. Ratner said that hardware design doesn’t translate through email chains and PDFs, and by the end of Ratner’s time at Amazon, she was spending the majority of her time building an internal collaboration tool to solve this problem for Amazon.
The duo met in grad school and launched the first version of AllSpice’s product in 2022, which was focused on small businesses and other startups. The company started to see growing demand from enterprises, pivoted, and has since landed customers such as Blue Origin, Bose, and Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity, among others.
The startup just raised a $15 million Series A round led by Rethink Impact with participation from L’attitude Ventures, Gingerbread Capital, and DNX Ventures, in addition to existing investors. The company will put the capital toward hiring and continuing to build out its product offerings.
AllSpice is also launching its new AI agent tool that helps validate engineers’ designs and spot mistakes.
“We’ve seen huge demand to find out how our hardware, [and] AI tools, can help make their teams more effective, catch these design errors, and that’s exactly what we’re targeting for this product,” Dumont said.
The company is purposefully launching this new AI agent just in closed beta for now, with an emphasis on working with their existing partners, Ratner said. The company wants to be able to ensure full accuracy before opening the product up further.
“The cost of a hardware mistake is so much higher than the cost of a software mistake,” Ratner said. “We have to make it in a way that makes sense for our industry, because of those kinds of broad differences between releasing a software product versus releasing a hardware product.”
