Colare, a San Francisco startup that screens hardware engineers with simulated job tasks, launched publicly Monday with a $2.5 million pre-seed round. Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures invested.
Why it matters: Aerospace, defense and manufacturing firms are hiring fast, and Colare says vetting one hardware engineer can take about 40 hours of senior engineers' time.
How it works
Colare maps a job description to hands-on assessments in areas such as CAD, PCB design, thermal analysis and finite element analysis. Candidates work in realistic engineering environments, and Colare scores both their process and output against rubrics built by senior engineers, the company said.
"Something like a structural bracket or a power board or a propulsion feed system has thousands of valid designs and thousands of subtly fatal ones," co-founder and co-CEO Esther Thomas told SiliconANGLE.
Customers and plans
About half of Colare's customers are in aerospace and defense, ranging from seed-stage startups to multibillion-dollar manufacturers. Thomas founded the company with co-CEO Nain Abdi, a former electrical engineer at Ford.
The money will go toward expanding its library of assessments into more niche deep-tech disciplines, SiliconANGLE reports.