Why We Invested in Circuit Mind
Today, Circuit Mind announced a new round led by Norwest. From the outside, it may look like an AI company that arrived at exactly the right moment. From where we sit, it is a classic overnight success that took eight years to build.
Blackhorn first backed Tomide Adesanmi and Basilio Gentile at seed in 2022. Since then we have watched the company grow into the market it always said was coming. Engineering teams that once saw automated board design as a nice-to-have now arrive asking for it. We are proud to invest again alongside Norwest, our fellow existing investors and the new partners joining the round.
The bet they made early
When Tomide and Basilio started Circuit Mind in 2018, there was no ChatGPT and no talk of AI copilots for engineers. Their thesis was simpler: board design was about to become the bottleneck for every hardware product, and the only way through was software that could do the engineering itself.
They made two calls that look obvious now and were not then. First, they built the deterministic engine before the AI layer: a structured model of real parts, datasheets and electrical rules that can verify a design. When large language models arrived, Circuit Mind had something trustworthy for agents to sit on, rather than a chatbot guessing at part numbers. Second, they treated the bill of materials as part of the design problem, not an afterthought. The chip shortages of 2020–2022 turned that from a feature into a requirement.
Neither call paid off quickly. Hardware buyers are careful, sales cycles are long, and for years the team was early. That patience is why they are ready now.
- 2018Founded out of research at Imperial College London
- 2020–2022Global chip shortages make BOM resilience a design requirement
- 2022Blackhorn invests at seed
- 2026$18.5M Series A led by Norwest; Agentic Verification Engine launches
Hardware's slowest step is the design front end
Engineers spend an estimated 1.5 billion hours a year designing circuit boards, more than £40 billion of work. Much of it is manual: reading datasheets, choosing parts, checking electrical rules, and redrawing designs that already exist somewhere else in the company.
The work is getting harder, not easier. Boards carry more components in less space, with tighter power and thermal limits. Since the 2020–2022 chip shortages, a single unavailable part can force a redesign, so bill-of-materials (BOM) choices are now a supply chain decision as much as an engineering one.
Meanwhile, the teams doing this work have not grown at the pace of demand. Software engineers got AI copilots in under two years. Hardware engineers, who cannot afford a hallucinated part number, are still largely on their own.
“Software teams are shipping 100 times faster with AI, but electronics design hasn't changed in 40 years.” Tomide Adesanmi, co-founder and CEO, Circuit Mind
What Circuit Mind does
An engineer sketches the system as a block diagram. Circuit Mind's platform, ACE, returns a verified, manufacturable schematic and an optimized BOM in about 60 seconds, exported into the design tools the team already uses. Its new Agentic Verification Engine (AVE), launched today, reviews existing schematics against component datasheets and a team's own design rules before anything goes to prototype.
Every step runs on a deterministic engineering core of real components, datasheets and electrical rules.
What makes it work for serious engineering teams is how it is built. Circuit Mind pairs AI agents with a deterministic engineering core: a structured model of real components, datasheets, and reusable design blocks, checked against electrical rules before anything reaches the engineer. The agents bring speed and flexibility. The engineering core makes sure every answer is buildable.
What we have seen since 2022
When we invested, Circuit Mind was a small team running pilots with a handful of design groups. Today it is deployed with enterprise hardware teams including Emerson, Schneider Electric and several Fortune 5 companies. The platform has grown from a single design tool into a set of AI agents that cover more of the design lifecycle, from generating a schematic to verifying one.
The change we notice most is who starts the conversation. In the early years, the team had to explain why board design needed automating. Now engineering leaders come to Circuit Mind with a backlog of boards and too few engineers to draw them.
That is what conviction looks like when it compounds: the same thesis, a sharper product, and a market that has moved toward it.
Why demand is arriving now
The market Tomide described in 2018 is here. Three shifts are pushing hardware teams to change how they work:
Teams are not asking whether to use AI in board design anymore. They are asking which tool they can trust with production hardware. Circuit Mind spent years earning the answer to that question before most buyers were asking it.
Why the team
Tomide and Basilio founded Circuit Mind in 2018 out of research at Imperial College London. Tomide is an electronic systems engineer who has designed boards himself, including at BAE Systems. Basilio, the company's CTO, is an optimization specialist who architected the engine at the core of the platform.
That pairing matters. Hardware engineers are a small, skeptical audience, and they have seen plenty of AI demos that fall apart on a real board. Tomide speaks their language, and the product earns trust because it was built to be checked, not just to impress.
Above all, they have been right about where the market was going and patient enough to wait for it. Founders who see the future early are common. Founders who keep building toward it through the years when customers are not yet ready are rare.
Why Blackhorn
Blackhorn invests in the technologies that make the industrial economy more productive and more resilient. Circuit Mind sits upstream of nearly all of it. The grid hardware, factory automation, electrified transport, and compute infrastructure we back all start as a circuit board, and faster, cheaper design speeds every one of them to market.
It also fits a pattern we care about: AI that does real engineering work, with the rigor that industrial buyers require. Our portfolio and network put us on the buyer's side of the table with manufacturers, defense primes, and infrastructure operators, and we have worked to open those doors for Circuit Mind since 2022, including introductions to US investors as this round came together.
Our role from here is the same as it has been: help the team land and expand with US industrial customers, build its US presence, and prepare for the next stage of growth.
The round and what comes next
Circuit Mind's $18.5M Series A, led by Norwest, is part of a $25M financing that brings total funding to $33.4M. Norwest general partner Dave Zilberman joins the board, bringing years of experience scaling enterprise software companies. Existing investors including Third Prime, Differential and Blackhorn returned, and Lightscape VC joined.
The capital funds a US headquarters, a larger commercial team, and continued expansion of the platform across the electronics design lifecycle. Next on the roadmap: extending the platform beyond design and verification into testing and firmware.
Overnight successes rarely happen overnight. This one took eight years of building ahead of the market. We are grateful to Tomide, Basilio, and the team for letting us be part of it since 2022, and we are excited for what they build next.
