Stage at our first check
Round we led in 2025
Headquarters
Team today
Founded by Samuel Ashcroft, chief executive, and Esther Caldwell, chief technology officer.
Building a circuit board is one of the most exacting high-volume processes there is. A bare board is screen-printed with solder paste, a machine mounts parts smaller than a grain of sand, and an oven melts the paste into joints that have to carry signal and power for a decade. Get the paste deposit slightly off or the thermal ramp slightly fast and you get bridges, voids, and cold joints, which inspection then chases with false calls or misses into the field.
Circuex runs those decisions. Edge-AI agents control the printer, the mounter, and the reflow profile, read the inspection and X-ray data coming back, and retune the line while it is running. Each change is rehearsed first in a digital twin of that specific line, so the target yield is settled before the first board is built. The craft this replaces currently lives with a small number of process engineers, most of whom are within a decade of retiring.
Samuel and Esther brought a tray of failed boards to the first meeting and spent an hour on tombstoning and head-in-pillow defects. Neither of them said the words artificial intelligence until we asked. Most factory software we see is a dashboard bolted onto a line nobody will let it touch. Circuex asked for control of the reflow oven in the first pilot, which is either the right answer or the fastest possible way to find out.
Noor Haddad, General Partner
How it has gone so far.
We led the $2.5m seed round, the first institutional money in.
First line goes live at a contract manufacturer in the Midlands.
Two further sites signed, both multi-line, both after a paid pilot.
Companies we backed at the same stage.
Elsewhere in the portfolio.
Building something like Circuex?
We write first checks at pre-seed and seed, and we answer within two business days.