AI startup Circuit Mind raises £18.8m led by Norwest with Third Prime
This article covers Circuit Mind, a London AI startup, which has raised £18.8m in a series A funding round to expand its electronic design intelligence platform and establish a U.S. headquarters. The funding aims to support engineering and electronics teams by shortening design cycles, optimising bills of materials and scaling the startup’s product and go-to-market teams.
Circuit Mind, a London AI startup, has raised £18.8m in a series A funding round to expand its platform for designing, verifying and optimising printed circuit boards. The capital will be used to broaden the product across the electronics design lifecycle, hire across sales, engineering and customer success, and set up a U.S. headquarters to serve North American customers — a move that matters as hardware development timelines and supply‑chain constraints remain a bottleneck for many engineering teams.
Why it matters
Hardware development remains slow and iterative. Circuit Mind says its tools cut design time from months to weeks, reduce bill of materials cost by about 25% and prevent costly prototype respins that can add more than a month to programmes. Those gains matter for companies juggling tight schedules and constrained components supply.
The announcement notes enterprise customers including Emerson, Schneider Electric and unnamed Fortune 5 companies are already piloting the platform. If the claimed improvements scale across larger programmes, they could shift how established engineering organisations manage architecture exploration and supplier choices.
Inside the product
Circuit Mind builds what it calls an electronic design intelligence platform that layers AI on top of physics‑based models and structured, machine‑readable component data. The platform plugs into existing ECAD tools, libraries and PLMs so teams do not have to rip up current workflows.
Two applications run on the platform:
- ACE (Assistant to Circuit Engineers) converts a hardware block diagram into a schematic, bill of materials and analysis in minutes, generating options optimised for cost, size, power or supply availability while evaluating constraints with a physics‑based decision engine.
- AVE (Agentic Verification Engine), launching with this round, runs AI agents to verify designs against component datasheets and a customer’s own design rules to surface issues before a prototype is built.
Circuit Mind cites a peer‑reviewed case study where engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory completed a design in four hours that would otherwise have taken two weeks. The company also highlights limits of general‑purpose large language models: those models lack the specialised training and engineering context needed to reach the accuracy required for physical hardware design.
In the announcement, Daniel GHENO, SVP Innovation and Technology and CTO Energy Management at Schneider Electric, said:
At Schneider Electric, we see AI as a way to amplify engineering expertise and accelerate innovation. Our collaboration with Circuit Mind demonstrates how AI can help engineers rapidly explore, compare, and optimise electronic architectures while leveraging company standards and reusable design knowledge. Early evaluations indicate the potential to reduce architecture exploration effort by more than 90%, enabling teams to focus more time on innovation, engineering judgment, and product differentiation.
Who are the investors?
The series A round was led by Norwest and includes participation from existing backers Third Prime, Differential and Blackhorn, plus new investor Lightscape VC. Circuit Mind also disclosed a previously unannounced seed round led by Third Prime. The £18.8m series A is part of total funding now reported at £25.1m.
As part of the deal, Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest, will join Circuit Mind’s board.
In the announcement, Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest, said:
Electronics design is one of the most complex and consequential engineering workflows, yet much of the process remains manual and time-consuming. Circuit Mind combines AI with physics-based models to fundamentally improve how engineers design electronics. With deep industry expertise and technical vision, Tomide and Basilio are uniquely positioned to lead this emerging category.
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Founder perspective
Circuit Mind was founded by Tomide Adesanmi and Basilio Gentile and is headquartered in London. The company intends to use the funding to grow product and go‑to‑market teams and to establish a U.S. headquarters to better serve North American customers.
In the announcement, Tomide Adesanmi, co‑founder and CEO of Circuit Mind, said:
Software teams are shipping 100 times faster with AI, but electronics design hasn't changed in 40 years. Circuit Mind is bringing to electronic engineering what Cursor, Claude Code, and Cognition have brought to software engineering: AI workflows that professional engineers can rely on. This funding allows us to bring that capability to more engineering teams and accelerate the shift toward Electronic Design Intelligence.
The bigger picture
Circuit Mind’s raise sits at the intersection of AI and hardware design, a space that has attracted fresh investor interest as companies seek to speed physical product development. For the UK and Europe, startups that reduce time‑to‑prototype and cost of goods have a clear route to commercial adoption among incumbents in industrial, energy and defence sectors.
The company plans to showcase its platform at Electronica 2026 in Munich, providing a live testbed for European and global engineering teams evaluating AI for electronics design. As hardware development increasingly leans on software‑driven workflows, expect more deals that blend domain expertise with specialised AI models to follow across the region.
They've invested in Circuit Mind
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