Hardware development cycles are dramatically longer than software cycles, creating a critical innovation bottleneck.
While software development cycles are typically measured in days or weeks, hardware testing and optimization can take months or even years. Yet, the technologies that will define our future — from clean energy to space exploration to advanced computing — likely depend on our ability to accelerate hardware innovation.
Enter Arena and its AI hardware engineer, dubbed Atlas, to help tackle this problem. Atlas helps accelerate hardware through advancements in testing, debugging, and optimization for the world's most advanced machinery. Grounded in applied physics and equipped to learn from real-world environments, Atlas operates throughout the hardware stack, starting with electrical engineering.
Arena announced its $30 Million Series B to accelerate the development of Atlas and continue its mission to transform how we build and test hardware.
𝗧𝗼 𝗖𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗨𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀:
• Arena raised $30 Million in Series B funding
• The company officially launched Atlas, an AI system that significantly accelerates hardware testing and optimization
• Arena operates in sectors including aerospace, automotive, semiconductors, medical devices, defense, and robotics
Atlas combines the power of large language models with specialization built for applied physics and fine-tuned in Arena's hardware lab. It can make sense of multimodal data beyond standard text and video — such as power curves, thermal profiles, and streaming HD video — to build a more complete understanding of how complex instruments behave.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁:
Arena will use the new capital to expand the team, enhance Atlas's capabilities, and scale deployment across industries where hardware innovation is critical.
Congratulations to Pratap Ranade and the entire Arena team! Excited to partner on the journey.
𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 SiliconANGLE & theCUBE 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://lnkd.in/ejWXBbUd
𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘢.
What if hardware development could look more like software develop? The last 50 years, we're really a golden age for software development. We made it easier and easier to write code. At the root of this is this idea of the software repple O the read, evaluate, print, loop. I can write a piece of code in my terminal, watch it run usually watch it break immediately, know what's wrong with the stack trace and fix it. And we built a huge ecosystem of tooling around that. Debuggers, linters, not to mention the fact that programming languages themselves have evolved. We moved from punch cards to high level programming languages like Python. That basically. Abstract away all of the hard stuff O It's been incredibly easy to develop software the whole time hardware has been left behind. The rebel loop for hardware engineering is months, whereas it's seconds for software. It's orders of magnitude slower. You design A circuit, you simulate it. It's cumbersome, it's slow. You test it. Inevitably there's issues and testing. You don't know if it's with how you did the test. You don't know if it's fundamental to the circuit. You don't know if it's other interference. You enter this endless cycle of test. Debug. You think you got it, you send it out, you get it reduced to get the prototype back and you need to respin it. So what's taking seconds and minutes and software is taking months in hardware. At Arena, we've built Atlas. Atlas is an AI hardware engineer. It's an expert partner that helps hardware engineers design, test, debug, and build cutting edge hardware. It takes a hardware repair loop and makes it 1000 times shorter. This is possible because Atlas is grounded in applied physics and has a full understanding of the engineers real world context. You can think about Atlas as effectively accumulating experience as it works with you. So you have an engineer in your organization who is learning through experience with the grounding and applied physics and access to all of the documents and data sheets for your device. Imagine what Atlas is becoming is an engineer with an incredibly deep understanding of how a system works. Thousands of years of understanding effectively, which actually means we'll enter an era where machines will be able to self diagnose and then self repair and self heal. And an arena. We're incredibly excited to play a small role here in powering the future of hardware.
Grateful for your support and to be part of Team Friends & Family Capital!