Antony Samuel - Artifact for Drag and Drop Electrical System Design

We explore how complex electrical systems can be designed faster and with more confidence by combining an intuitive canvas with deep electrical intelligence and pragmatic AI. Anthony Samuel shares lessons from aerospace startups, Y Combinator and competing with incumbents while staying focused on validation and usability.

• Seed funding from YC, Floodgate, Boost VC, enabling hiring and product build
• Why New York and other hubs matter for advanced hardware
• Startups versus incumbents framed as validation of the market
• Respect for safety: AI as assistant, not replacement
• Common failure modes in harness design and integration
• Artifact’s core: collaborative system schematics to manufacturing outputs
• Visio-like ease with domain intelligence under the hood
• Parts libraries, BOM accuracy, and rules checking roadmap
• Concept-to-detail design flow and future integrations
• De-risking: technical execution and market fit through real users

Transcript

Guest Intro And Funding Story

Roopinder 0:19

Hello and welcome to the FoDES, the Future of a Design and Engineering Software Podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara. On the show, we will have a guest that will discuss tools and technology that engineers will find interesting and useful. Today we have as our guest Antony Samuel. Anthony is a co-founder and CEO of Artifact.engineer. He is a degreed electrical engineer from Georgia Institute of Technology, and his company has been fortunate enough to have a good round of financing. Anthony, can you tell me about how you got your financing?

Why Build In New York

Antony 0:55

When you were doing our fundraising round, that was back in March. So we had been in the Y Combinator startup accelerator out in San Francisco for three months. At the end of the startup accelerator, they do demo day as well as they open up the floors for a lot of these companies to do their fundraising round. We were lucky enough to have Floodgate and Boost VC be leading those rounds as well as a couple of other great investors. But yeah, raising our three and a half million dollar seed round really puts us in a good position to set up shop, hire some excellent engineering talent, and build a compelling design software that's helping electrical engineers build their systems.

Roopinder 1:30

So congratulations with that. Thank you. But it's a bit of a surprise because we met here on the in San Francisco during a session I was moderating and you were on the panel. And we always think San Francisco is the center of the universe. But you're in New York.

Antony 1:45

Yeah, correct. Yeah, my co-founder was actually already in New York, which is why we set up shop here. And I think there's a lot of really interesting hardware companies in San Francisco in LA. But a lot of people forget that there's big hubs in New York, specifically Brooklyn, Boston, Denver, Austin, Texas, Atlanta as well. So lots of different cities here in the U.S. all building pretty complex hardware. Definitely exciting, though.

Competing With Siemens And Incumbents

Roopinder 2:08

I concede that there are other places. New York always thinks of itself as a financial capital of the world, and which bothers me. Many other things, publishing as well. We always have this East Coast, West Coast rival. We didn't get a chance to explore in that panel, which was all about AI for engineers and manufacturing. You didn't really get a chance to explore what Artifact does. And I was thought of you this morning because I read this news report about Siemens and it was talking about what I thought Artifact did, make a system level design automation program. And I thought more of what we talked about in the panel, was which was are you at all worried about these big guys coming in and eating your lunch? Right? Did that happen this morning? Not too bad.

Antony 2:52

And I'm gonna dig a little bit more into it. But yeah, no, I think it's an important question to be thinking about any any kind of small entrant who's really trying to play that innovator's dilemma game against an incumbent. You really have to think about okay, what value is that small team going to provide? And what is like the rate of development that a small team can provide compared to one of these incumbents? So yeah, I mean, I'm super excited about what Siemens is working on, but something where the tide raises all boats. How I think the mindset around big, complex systems engineering, specifically with electrical, we really want to provide a lot more systems awareness to every individual engineer. When I hear that Siemens is working on that, in my head, it's like, all right, one of the biggest players in the space is validating that this is a meaningful market and the right direction for engineering to go. Now, on the flip side, am I excited about competing with Siemens from a usability and UI perspective? Something that has kind of like thinking about the AI hooks at its core of an application. Yeah, it's a it seems like an exciting problem. It's a compelling problem. I've been a Siemens user before in the past for designing aircraft, supersonic jets, very familiar with their stacked. It's going to be a fun challenge thinking about how Artifact thinks about the problem a little bit differently.

Lessons From Boom And Hermius

Roopinder 3:59

Startups are definitely more nimble than this multi-billion dollar manufacturing conglomerate, that's for sure. You mentioned you work for supersonic flight. It was boom. You work for Boom and Hermius. Yeah. It's getting quite a bit of attention in this world. And exemplifies what you're talking about. That it was small companies, agile companies can compete with giants because here they are competing Lockheed and Boeing and aircraft companies, right?

Antony 4:25

I like to think that Boom and Hermius, they were doing it before it was cool. They're fighting through the underdogs, kind of fighting like for Boom, it was like Boeing, and then for Hermius, certainly more of the defense primes. And I think that they were very convicted that the right way to build this was from a small team, moving very quickly, iterating fast. I think SpaceX probably maybe trailblazed a lot of the culture around this is actually possible. We can't just let the legacy primes figure it out on their own. Of course, like working very closely with the legacy primes is important for success, especially from a national defense standpoint. I certainly don't over-index on it's not startups versus the big companies. It is like, hey, how do we solve this engineering problem kind of alongside each other because we're all chasing the same vision? Working at Boom at Hermius, I think getting those contextualized repetitions, getting that practice, everything from building teams to iterating through development cycles, super, super blessed and glad that I had those experiences. It certainly shapes how we build our product as well.

AI’s Role In Hardware Engineering

Roopinder 5:19

Yeah, yeah. That's a it's not just aircraft, it's uh industry-wide. Now, the idea that can a room full of engineers actually design a supersonic aircraft? Can a small team actually make a new car? I was very disappointed that Apple dropped its plans for the iCar. I thought I was sure they were gonna design a better car than anybody else. I love the way that software and now AI is giving engineers a way to fly high with design. You know, I was I've been very critical over the last couple of years since ChatGPT came out, how design companies were disregarding AI because they thought, oh, and what can they do for us? Nothing. And they dragged their feet on implementing AI. I was very encouraged to see companies like Artifact and others, the others on our panels too, finally presenting applications that use AI for engineering purpose. It's quite gratifying.

Antony 6:12

Yeah, absolutely. I think we certainly saw the software world be the first wave of folks who are adopting these new tools and really rethinking, hey, what's it gonna take for us to be able to leverage this new technical capability? I think we're seeing in the hardware world lagging behind, but certainly that's where Artifact is trying to ride that curve before it really starts ramping up. From a cultural perspective, a lot of the hardware engineers, maybe they don't want to trust that like the AI black box, the magic thing, because the inputs have to be perfect and the outputs have to be very verifiable. So it is important as we are building these, whether it's artifact, whether it's other companies, for these highly critical systems, for these highly complex systems, really kind of having a certain level of reverence for what the AI is actually doing to help these engineers, but also allowing engineers to be very technically competent, be held to a very high level of accountability, because we certainly don't want to AI magic away responsibility, especially when you have these highly critical systems. There's maybe anchoring it in, okay, how do we actually take what engineers are working on and really augment their capability and really reduce their iteration cycle speeds too? Thinking through those fun problems as well.

Validation, Safety, And Rigor

Roopinder 7:20

You touched on this as a very important subject for engineers, especially older ones. Older, let's say established engineers who are kind of with any new technology, right? Because they've built planes that don't fall out of the sky for the most part, right? And they're very happy with that. They don't want to change anything, they don't want to optimize even. They want aircraft to be reliable, right? They're afraid. And here we are with this. Okay, now suddenly the doors open for considering all sorts of different things. There's always this problem I have with validation. Like, none of these new designs are getting validated properly. Maybe they are. But tell me, is this a problem that you consider validation?

Pain Points In Complex Electrical Systems

Antony 8:00

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you really want to think about like what are the core problems, like even independent of the technology, right? So let's say that we have in one hand our technology, which might be these AI tools, like for example, LLMs, but then very independent of how you implement it, we still have the technical problem of, hey, complex hardware is attempted to be built by everyone from small teams to large teams. And of course, there's the how do we actually design this in an efficient way? How do we verify and validate that the system is built right? How do we test these things right? And then how do we also support these when they're in their sustainment programs as well? And I think that there's of course the actual like technical axis of like, hey, how are we actually gonna like think about the physics? But then there's also like a time and and value and dollars axis as well, right? So I think it really is probably gonna be good for everyone if more complex systems can be built faster and more reliably, right? Okay, so let's take that requirement for what it is. And then you're saying, okay, how do we do this? And then sometimes, whether it's uh computational fluid dynamics, or maybe it's Excel, or maybe it's the internet, or maybe now in the age of AI, it might be AI. You end up kind of starting with the question of, hey, how do we actually do engineering right? How do we actually like increase the capability of these companies that are chasing these ambitious projects? And then, hey, okay, we might have a technical unlock or a technology unlock that can actually allow us to do this. Then great. That's something that's probably worth pursuing. Now, I certainly don't want to always just be like, hey, we're gonna wave some AI magic at a problem and make it better. Something we like to do is go through the mental exercise and be very, very rigorous in terms of how are we defining the problem, what are the assumptions we're making, and then how are we gonna attempt to solve it? And I think the same thing probably goes for the industry as well. It's not just like engineering with AI magic. It is how do you be very, very specific about the engineering problems that you have and how you're gonna solve it. So take the planes falling out of the sky example you mentioned, maybe a little tongue in cheek, but even thinking about some of the famous vehicle programs for electrical systems, where has that actually held up vehicle programs, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in just integration timelines, right? You can take like Airbus A380 is maybe the most famous example, but there are plenty. Everyone from the Global Hawk program to Air Force One, lots of downtime because of either electrical design mismatches, teams aren't collaborating with each other, you're installing these harnesses into a vehicle and they end up not being correct because maybe like teams weren't coordinating properly, manufacturing of bill of materials being incorrect. So it ends up being the common source of failure for these big electrical systems. And then you're saying, okay, now I have a problem here. How do I actually make that better? And then you can start considering AI as a potential aid to solving that problem, and then you build a product around that. And I think that that's maybe the order of operations that I find a little bit more compelling than just seeing what the AI spits out. That doesn't seem as rigorous.

Roopinder 10:45

Right, right. I think it definitely helps that you are in the industry and what engineers need to do in the industry and you can adapt AI to that purpose, which is much more desirable than say somebody who's just a programmer, developer, and who says, Hey, I can jump on this AI wave and make some money.

Antony 11:03

It definitely takes money, it takes that uh the software engineer whiz or whiz started to also build it and bring a lot of the cool best practices in the software world is hardware solution. So it's good to learn from those guys as well.

Roopinder 11:15

So you had a, I'd say, a pretty good career going. You worked at Boom, you worked at Hermius. You could have stayed in that business. Tell me about that light bulb that went off that said, hey, I've got to start Artifact.

Founders’ Origin And Hackathon Spark

Antony 11:28

I certainly have much love for the team at Boom and at Hermius. That's something I certainly would have been very happy continuing. Certainly working with my co-founder, even just we had done like hackathon together just for fun. It'll be fun to catch up. We'll do something. It was hosted by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense. Uh, so we were out there working on can we come up with cool algorithms to potentially triangulate drones based off of their audio signatures? We ended up using our laptop microphones and putting them in positions that you can previously define, actually triangulate a source of a drone noise coming in. We were doing a demo where we had like a speaker making drone sounds and kind of walking around with it and seeing how these laptop microphones, based off of some actually surprisingly simple geometry, could actually triangulate where the drone was based off of how loud the drone sound was on different laptops.

Roopinder 12:16

What the Ukraine is doing with uh drones is incredible.

Antony 12:19

It's technically very intense, but we caught up over this and we were driving from LA to San Francisco for the hackathon. We're just talking about like some of the biggest problems that we see in the industry. At this point, Corbin, he had been exploring some AI tools for aerospace development, like when you're actually doing vehicle design. Hey, is there a way that we can think about vehicle configuration in a way that AI can help? I had recently onboarded one of our competitors' products at Hermius and I felt very convicted that this is actually a very meaningful space. It's not just the electrical design in a silo, but it's like, how do you actually think about the entire systems engineering problem for these planes or satellites or nuclear reactors or energy storage or whatever your problem might be? So I think that that was a way to just think about this is not only something that I'm personally feeling the pain of, but it started to become something that I believed that we could fix as well. So yeah, I think the more exciting part of the job these days is getting to really see a cross-section of how do electrical engineers and systems engineers build their product, industry agnostic, but also scale agnostic too. What are the big companies doing, like the DOD primes? What are the startups that are still two or three people in a basement doing? I think that making the jump from leading teams and being an individual contributor on the electrical engineering front to, hey, how do I actually think electrical engineering, maybe almost philosophically, should be done? That's been a very rewarding shift in the career. But you know, I certainly have much love for the wrench turning PCB designing. That is, I'm sure you can relate to that as well.

Roopinder 13:43

How far ahead of you were you to where there were funds available? Because you must have had this idea before venture capitalists even knew how to spell CAD.

What Artifact Actually Does

Antony 13:53

It all went actually a lot faster than I had anticipated. We had on a whim applied to Y Combinator, the startup accelerator in San Francisco, and they just said, all right, like we didn't we had nothing but an idea and maybe like two slides of hey, this is what we're gonna be building. And I guess I I don't know, maybe it's something about me and Corbin having come from the engineering space, and maybe like the passion and conviction that we had around the problem came through. Starting with that, they took a bet on us, which I'm very grateful for. And then going through that Y Combinator program, taking about nine weeks to really build out, hey, what does a roadmap actually look like? What does a minimum viable product look like? And then having a couple customers who are willing to take a bet on us and get in contract and be design partners with us as we were gonna build out this pretty difficult, pretty intense CAD tool. And I think having those early believers who understood the problem and understood what we were gonna do, that allowed us to actually do some fundraising in March. Hey, like, okay, you you have some customers who are actually like have validated that this problem is real. And the investors, for the most part, were pretty excited to say, all right, we'll take a small bet here and then build it out, actually get it in use, learn from it, make it better. And then I guess the future fundraising rounds, we'll see what happens there.

Roopinder 15:02

What did mom and dad say when you said I want to do a startup? Yeah.

Antony 15:05

No, I'm lucky that they've always been pretty supportive. I remember I think I was like graduating college and I wanted to work at a startup. I'd been in a couple different aerospace startups. So maybe a lot of folks didn't know what startups were. So they certainly had their questions. I think really throughout my entire career, they've been very supportive of chasing what the most interesting problem to Antony is. So I very much appreciate their support. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it without them either.

Roopinder 15:29

Tell me more about your upbringing. You're Indian, right? Your parents delivered.

Demo Walkthrough And Collaboration

Antony 15:33

My parents, no, they're actually in Houston. Um, but yeah, older sister, younger brother came to the U.S. before I was born. Uh, I was born in Texas, lived overseas for a couple years because my dad worked in oil and gas, then went back to Texas for middle school and high school, went to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, which is a phenomenal school. And then, yeah, was uh lucky enough to do some internships at some aerospace companies. There's one in Atlanta called Generation Orbit, which is actually my first aerospace startup. And yeah, it was a phenomenal, phenomenal team. So I was very lucky when I was laying harnesses, I was vending tubes, we were lighting rocket engines, and this team, the leadership team at Generation Orbit, ended up actually being the founding team at Hermius, which is how I had that connection. Dipping my toes in that aerospace world, I realized, hey, it's just certainly more exciting for me to be a part of this small team chasing a big problem, maybe opposed to working at one of the Boeings or one of the bigger companies. I felt like it was personally very exciting to me to work at a startup, which is kind of ended up going on that route.

Roopinder 16:28

The only professions permitted in my family were I was going to be a doctor or a engineer. So right. So I I chose engineering, which I didn't realize was the harder of the two. I've heard this from people who have both. There's a very small intersection of doctors and engineers, but they have said, without exception, that engineering was a harder one, right? This is a harder one.

Antony 16:49

Yeah, we have a family of engineers too. My older sister, she was an industrial engineer and then spent the last 10, almost 11 years now in finance. And then my younger brother, he did computer science. He's in Dallas actually working at Lockheed Martin.

Roopinder 17:00

But so he's the black sheep then.

Antony 17:02

Oh, I wouldn't say that. I would say maybe maybe yeah, they're both much smarter than I am. No, no, but I know my parents did a good job there for certain.

Roopinder 17:09

Yes, they did. That's it. I'd say they're three for three. That's great. What does Artifact do? We didn't get into this. What does Artifact do actually? Tell me the problem it solves.

Antony 17:18

Perfect. So Artifact is a system design tool for the electrical systems. So when you open up the hood of your car, you can see all of these wires going from all of these electrical boxes, you know, given power, given data, whatever it might be. And we're helping the engineers actually design that nervous system. All the wires that they might see, whether it's a car, whether it's a rocket, a plane, a nuclear reactor, really any big piece of hardware that's typically very multidisciplinary, lots of interdependencies between their systems. We help them design their big system as a whole. And the output is these drawings of the wires and the cables and the harnesses that they typically see.

Roopinder 17:55

Yeah. Okay.

From Visio To Intelligent Schematics

Antony 17:56

So this is not at the chip level, and it's also not at the circuit board level. It's actually one level above that. When folks have a bunch of circuit boards or they have a bunch of electrical boxes, that's where we come in. We help them actually design out these system schematics and then be able to export out the manufacturing drawings for the harnesses themselves. Okay. Is there any optimization going on at this point that AI could be helping with? Yeah, so there is a bit of an order of operations here. I think that where we spend a lot of time thinking about is how do our atomic units right or our elementary operations, the tools that currently exist in the space often are pretty limited, they're pretty clunky, the UIs aren't great. So we're actually spending a lot of our time, especially in our first year of, hey, let's build out our initial product, is actually getting those non-AI features done right first. You can think about it as like building VS Code before you go out and build cursor. So we actually spend a lot of time just thinking about how do we actually be very, very flexible to lots of different types of electrical systems, the same way that 3D CAD is very generic. It's not you you typically don't have CAD that's hyper-optimized for aerospace or automotive or anything. It's kind of CAD is CAD. So we're trying to really figure out and kind of invent often what does that look like for electrical systems, both at the design side, but also on the collaboration side. Like what's the right way to have teams of tens or hundreds or thousands of engineers actually designing their systems in concurrence, both at the component level, but how do you actually design a system or a system of systems? How do they interact with each other? We're actually building out a lot of those optimization, as you mentioned, that becomes the layer that we build throughout, as well as on top these elementary operations and these atomic units that I mentioned.

Roopinder 19:30

At what stage would a EE electrical engineer use your application, would it be at the concept level? And then also does it interface with the standard EA packages like Siemens or Mentor Synopsis? Any of that?

Parts Libraries And Rules Checking

Antony 19:43

Yeah, the vision for the product is to really go the entire product lifecycle. So we want to start at conceptual design, go to detail design, go into the manufacturing, the vendor management, all the way to integration and test, and then sustainment. Right now we're really focused on that detail design to manufacturing. And procurement step in the process. But I really see conceptual design to detail design being a big, big opportunity for the AI to actually propagate out. I have this block diagram and I have this parts library. Like go out and make some of these drawings for me. That certainly seems pretty inevitable. And we're building a lot of those hooks into our application today. Right now, we've got to make sure that the detailed design canvas is actually done right so we can have all the right data types for people to load in their conceptual designs and create the detailed designs that they'll have. The integrations are certainly going to be a long-term requirement. In the short term, it actually doesn't seem like an initial requirement for a lot of our mid-market and startup customers. But yeah, eventually being able to hook into Altium and KiCat on the PCB side into SolidWorks and NX and OnShape. We really want to be seamless with the entire workflow, especially having a single source of truth for the electrical design. You know, that also includes really the whole system. So we see an opportunity to actually link into everything, hopefully maintain that single source of truth as well.

Roopinder 20:58

Are you a product to show yet, or is that to be a future?

Antony 21:01

Yeah, happy to show it. Can you see my screen all right?

Roopinder 21:03

Yes.

Harness Complexity In Cars And Aircraft

Antony 21:04

Perfect. So yeah, this is typically what people see when they log into Artifact. They see this big canvas, they can navigate through the projects in their system, or they can open up a drawing that's previously existing. Everything we have is version controlled and tagged. You can branch off of things, you can create your read-only drawings, all that good stuff. This is typically the first drawing that I'll put in front of a customer. This is a very, very simple fake drawing. No electrical system would ever be this simple, but it shows off a lot of the capabilities that people can typically expect out of a tool like Artifact. Having things like a, hey, I'm gonna have my single board computer here. I'm gonna go out to some type of motor controller, which goes out to some set of connections, going out to maybe some wings or a rudder, and then being able to do some pretty cool features like, okay, hey, like what if I wanted to trace my nets throughout my system? We have the Google Docs style real-time collaboration as well. So really you can have anyone in your org pull up this diagram as well. But we really try to keep it very easy to create these types of systems. I'll typically do this example where I'm gonna bring in a flight computer, I'm gonna bring in a Ethernet cable, and then I'm gonna just bring in a Ethernet jack. And if I just want to really quickly create these connections, have my function names cascade, and then once I've actually designed out a system like this using these pretty intuitive drag and drop features, how do I actually see like my full list of connections, every source, every target, and how they connect? I want to see a full bill of materials so my procurement team knows what are all the boxes I need, what are all the connections I need, how long of cable do I need to build this system, and what are the tools that I need to build the system. And then going out and being able to export these drawings to my team of technicians or whatever as well. We spent a lot of time thinking that what's the most intuitive way for engineers to go out and design their systems, but also like for these big teams. How do we make sure that everyone's looking at the same source of information and building the right thing as effectively as possible as well? But yeah, this is a very introductory version of the demo I'll do for customers.

Roopinder 23:00

Interesting. It reminds me of have you, I don't know if you've heard of Visio. Visio is a drag and drop application that you could just pick shapes, but yours seems to combine the two things that the drag and drop interface with uh electrical intelligence.

Antony 23:14

I'm really glad you mentioned this. So typically how people are designing their systems is they either so I I've actually people are always surprised when I tell them I've I've designed supersonic jets in in Visio. But yeah, like one solution is you you the PowerPoints and the draw.io's and the Visio. And then the other are the like the 40-year-old enterprise tools for electrical wire drawing. And we wanted to bring the smarts and the capability of these electrical system drawings, like the PCB tools. How do we actually bring a lot of that intelligence into the tool? From a customer UI perspective, how do we actually keep it very simple? Like almost we want to be deceptively intelligent for what the UI is. So we take a lot of the design cues from the Visios and the Dryos because they do a really excellent job of being very intuitive to a new user. So we certainly take a lot of those design elements from those worlds when we are building something with these extra layers of intelligence on top of it.

Roopinder 24:06

I'm surprised you knew about Visio just because Microsoft took that product and just about hit it in the portfolio, I think maybe 30 years ago or so.

Antony 24:14

Very, very familiar with Visio. I've spent many, many hours, if not days or weeks, heads down in that tool.

Roopinder 24:20

For what it did, it was like perfect. It just lacked that engineering intelligence. Like shapes were just shapes. And I was very happy that they would be joined together. That was nice, but it didn't reflect flow diagrams, it didn't reflect flow for electrical diagrams, it didn't reflect circuits. Something was missing. So it looks like you put that in.

Antony 24:39

There's the very bare bones, which is like how do you track your electrical nets? How do you have your function names propagate? All that good stuff. But really, I think the layer on top of that is enabling technology. How do you actually get like an AI co-pilot that can help you design and help you analyze and do these electrical rules checks and design rules checks?

Roopinder 24:56

The components we were picking were real life components. They were actually manufacturers' parts. Correct.

Career, Mentors, And Business Learnings

Antony 25:02

So anything from circuit boards to electrical boxes, connectors, cables, wires, we can specify those parts in a library and then drag those in and then start connecting them that way too.

Roopinder 25:12

With each component, you're actually picking up the electrical characteristics of that.

Antony 25:16

So right now we have a very, very bare bones level of it. What are the pins? What are the connectors that are what are the mating part numbers for wires? We take in wire gauge. And then really we want to build in a lot of those electrical smarts, everything from characteristic impedance or maximum currents. All of these become really required if you are going to do a meaningful set of electrical rules checks, is understanding, hey, what is everything that is going on with this component? We had an early prototype for a data sheet parser. We ended up putting that on pause just because it maybe seemed a little bit more of a science fair kind of like razzle dazzle than something that was going to be immediately impactful to our customers. But we kind of are bullish on that type of technology, really unlocking what you can actually learn when you're designing the system opposed to when you've built it and integrated it. And unfortunately you you fry a fuel valve or you burn a motor, which are all things that have done before, kinds of failures. Really, we want to make sure people can learn those a little bit ahead of time.

Roopinder 26:08

Yeah, yeah. This seems ideal for I understand an electrical designer. He said electrical harnesses, wire harnesses were like his whole job. That's all he did was make harnesses and a car like a Tesla, for example, could have many, many electrical harnesses and very complex too. It's a whole car's electrical system. That was a whole job for a whole department.

Antony 26:29

It is like a death by a thousand paper cuts type of challenge as well. Like any one wire is easy. When you have 10,000 wires, now it became hard, right? So the pain is the aggregate. So it it is like a tricky type of technical problem.

Roopinder 26:41

So car would be a one level, and I imagine like a fly-by-wire aircraft would be next order.

Closing And Listener Invite

Antony 26:47

Oh, yeah, definitely. Lots of the drone companies and the jet companies who are using Artifact, like the stakes are pretty high just because the sheer quantity of wires that they have. But going back to the idea of highly complex but also highly critical, if one of these wires is actually wrong, does that actually, you know, mean your plane falls out of the sky or not? I guess it depends on the system. But the criticality is pretty high for a lot of our customers.

Roopinder 27:07

So you got your financing. So I imagine gonna have to do some serious RD before you go to the next level of funding, right? So what's what's on the agenda? You mentioned that a system could be smarter, for example, could know more about electrical performance. What else? Growing the team?

Antony 27:22

But I categorize these things into technical risks or technical de-risks, I should say, and then market de-risks as well. So on the technical de-risks side, it's like how do we actually build out something that is good, that it works? The real-time collaboration is good, the electrical smarts are good. Something quite like this doesn't really exist. We certainly have our very large share of technical things to figure out and implement in a smart way, during exceptional software engineers comes into play. We've done that a little bit. We've hired our first employee from Tesla, incredible software engineer. So really making sure that we're holding that high bar for development. And then, of course, we also have the the other side. This is like how do you actually de-risk the market? And this is where we're actually working with really ambitious startups, working with really ambitious mid-market customers, and also like working with these bigger companies too, really making sure, hey, we understand their problems, we actually have like a go-to-market strategy. We want to build it, bring in their entire libraries, we want to bring in all of their pre-existing drawings and really actually do that in a meaningful way. And then validate our hypothesis. If we build this product that solves these problems, then engineering teams can actually design their systems a lot more accurately and a lot faster, fewer integration challenges, and really making sure that the market validates that hypothesis. And that really just comes down to who are these early users going to be. We're a little bit after the design partnership phase. People are actually using our tool, which is exciting to see, but being very, very responsive to our customers, figuring out what are the next problems they have, and then how do we keep on growing the tool that keeps up with pace of what our customers need as well.

Roopinder 28:48

I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile and I'm looking for a business degree because you sound like you have one, but very far from it. How did you back up this business knowledge?

Antony 28:56

It's hard to pinpoint it exactly. I think that's probably a combination of having worked at a couple different startups, whether it was the founders at Boom, the founders at Hermius and Generation Orbit, the same crew, but uh very lucky to have those technical mentors professionally. Of course, the friends, the family who've also been great at sharing advice, learning from all these people around me has certainly been very important for me not floundering too much. I'm an electrical engineer, I'm a circuit boards guy. So going into YC, it was certainly a little bit of a different space. I'm not an investor, I'm not in the VC world, I don't know the famous names, I don't know the magic words to say when you're raising money. But I think just being able to learn from all the people around you and being truly excited about the problem that you're trying to solve. Has that combo kind of worked out for us? Or so far it has? Continuing to learn from a lot of the people around me is the name of the game for us.

Roopinder 29:44

I'm very glad to see you have the measure of success you've had already, and I hope to hear greater things in the future. I'm very encouraged that engineers are being recognized for what they can do, and it's not just startup people with good ideas only. It's like real engineers trying to fix problems. So I wish you the best of luck and I hope for greater things. I hope to stay in touch.

Antony 30:05

Absolutely. It was great getting a chat with you today. Hope you have a great day.

Roopinder 30:08

Thanks very much, Antony. Thanks for your time. Thank you for listening to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software show, brought to you by ENGtechnica. I hope you have learned of a new application or technology that will help you with your job. If you have an application you think would be of interest to other engineers, please let me know by emailing me at roopinder at engtechnica.com or message me on LinkedIn.