Quilter was founded in 2019 by Sergiy Nesterenko, a former SpaceX avionics engineer who saw firsthand how much manual, error-prone effort goes into laying out printed circuit boards. PCB design is one of the last heavily manual steps in hardware development: an engineer takes a schematic and painstakingly places hundreds of components and routes thousands of connections, balancing impedance, signal integrity, thermal behavior and manufacturability. Quilter's thesis is that this work can be done autonomously by AI that reasons from physics rather than copying human habits.
The platform is built around reinforcement-learning agents trained on first-principle electromagnetic and thermal physics. Instead of mimicking how human designers have routed boards in the past, Quilter's system explores the design space, generates many candidate placements and routings, simulates the physical behavior of each, and selects layouts that meet the board's constraints. This lets it quantify and eliminate the subtle electromagnetic and thermal effects that often ruin a board only after it has been manufactured and tested.
Quilter handles boards in the 100 to 1,000-component range and validates designs for impedance control, differential pairs, bypass-capacitor placement and more. It integrates with the CAD ecosystems engineering teams already use, including Altium, Cadence, Siemens and the open-source KiCad, so the autonomous output drops into existing fabrication pipelines. Customers span semiconductors, aerospace and defense, consumer electronics and robotics, with the company citing AWS, Nvidia and Siemens among its users.
In October 2025 Quilter announced a $25 million Series B led by Index Ventures, with Nina Achadjian joining the board. The round brought total funding to $40 million from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue, Root Ventures and industry angels including Lip-Bu Tan. The company targets a market it frames around hundreds of billions of dollars of aerospace, defense and consumer-electronics hardware as Fortune 500 firms adopt autonomous PCB design.