alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks
Hey HN, we’re Will & Johnny from ProvenMetal (https://provenmetal.com). You send us design files or specs and we give you assembled boards domestically in days.
The US produced 30% of PCBs globally in 2000, now they produce 4%. Chinese manufacturers have completely dominated this space at 55% of global production.
Now, the need for a domestic PCB supply chain is higher than ever before, yet the infrastructure has been dissolving over the last 2 decades. What is left is mostly small family run manufacturers (CMs) that have been operating in largely the same, labor intensive way since the early 2000’s.
When you place an order through a CM it typically takes several days to receive a quote and complete design for manufacture review, and then you have to source all of the components (the hardest part) and bare boards yourself, then wait anywhere from a few days to several weeks for the assembly and testing of those boards.
We started off assembling circuit boards out of a garage with prosumer grade equipment (NeoDen YY1, Glenbrook X-ray, solder paste stencils, and manual rework stations). We believed that by owning the manufacturing process, we could turn all the front of house automations inwards. But here’s the thing… manufacturing circuit boards with prosumer grade equipment out of a garage takes a huge amount of time. Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business. We were completely capacity constrained, with fancy software automations that are not the binding constraint at low volumes.
Then we got our heads out of the weeds, took a step back, and realized that we were trying to solve the wrong bottlenecks.
These manufacturers are good at manufacturing and terrible at the front of house (quoting, DFM review, and part procurement). When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck. So we stopped trying to solve the problem that we can’t solve at this stage.
We measured the bottlenecks and nailed down the ones that we are best positioned to solve right now.
When a customer wants a domestically manufactured circuit board, it is not a straight forward process. We are making that process easy through front of house automation. A customer gives us their design files, and we automatically procure components, and co-ordinate bare board fabs and assembly houses to get quotes, design review, and manufacturing completed in a very tight loop.
How we solve part procurement (you can’t assemble boards with no parts!): When a user places an order with us, our system automatically sources their bill of materials across US and overseas distributors. However, when we work with customers during the design process, our plug-ins interact with KiCAD and Altium, sending the BOM to our ordering platform, which allows us to automatically procure components before layout is finalized.
KiCAD plugin: (https://github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-kicad)
Altium plugin: (https://github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-altium)
This enables us to order long lead time parts in advance, suggest alternatives if parts are out of stock, and solve the biggest bottleneck in the process. We store parts in our hq in SF, and then kit the boards and route them through our network. We also do long term storage of parts for long lead time items.
How we solve endless emails: Every manufacturer wants the same information in a different shape. There’s usually a few days of back and forth emailing to achieve clarity. We’re building a profile per manufacturer and sending the order to fit their requirements. This may sound trivial but it removes a multi-day round trip on most orders, which on a quick-turn build is a meaningful share of the time.
How to solve design review: Each manufacturer has individual capability sheets, and so we have a heuristic harness that Fable 5 uses to check the board for DFM issues. We’re building a streamlined process for end-to-end pcb manufacturing, but is that enough to solve the supply chain? Not a chance. Capacity is the problem, and no amount of smart software will solve it. We’re extracting real slack from the system today, that slack is finite, and at some volume the only remaining move is adding physical capacity. We think that’s where this goes.
We charge a simple margin on the order value depending on order complexity with fully transparent quote breakdowns. We took our first paying order in less than a week and we’ve done roughly $70k across 11 orders in 6 weeks.
We are very interested in your opinion. We’re working in a problem space that has problems everywhere, we’re constantly pulled in wild directions regarding which problems we solve and how we go about solving them. What do you know that we can learn from?
Comments
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
When you say PCB at the beginning are you referring to raw PCBs or PCBAs? Presumably your service will be sourcing raw PCBs from China still and just doing PCBA?
When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.
Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.
Congratulations!
Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.
We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.
We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.
Each of these pretty established suppliers offer this service:
- Sunstone
- Advanced Assembly
- Sierra Circuits
- Osh Park
They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.
Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?
I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.
> Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business
> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.
I’m confused, which one is it?
I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?
Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?
This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.
This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.
I think this is a huge opportunity — speed, domestic production _and_ overall usability of the process - i do think appearing serious business matters a lot in this space, i found your site a little lacking in terms of prose, details, etc. Really great idea though.
I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.
I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.
I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.
This is an exciting project! My main feedback: you can definitely tell the website content is AI-generated. It's okay to vibe code the design, but I really hesitate when I see vibed writing.
Curious how the pricing compares to overseas fabs once you factor in the 7-day turn — is that gap closing enough for non-defense teams to switch too, or is this mainly aimed at people who need the domestic supply chain regardless of cost?
Nice but the USA are not our global friends anymore.
Anything available in the EU?
The upstream BOM feedback seems especially useful: surfacing availability and lead-time alternatives before layout is final should prevent many avoidable redesign loops. Showing those trade-offs directly in the plugin would make the value easy to evaluate.
You guys should really be making an end to end PCB machine, sourcing the parts and part inventory for custom PCBs really should be the responsibility of the end user.
I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.
The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.
> Drone and defense teams get boards back in 7 days
Oh
I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh? Sure it's profitable but there's a reason hardware manufacturing is generally outsourced to the lowest bidder. Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally? Manufacturing hardware (especially if you are not Apple) is generally a capital intensive, low profit margin business that is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The fact that the past two decades of growth in the US is dominated by tech companies is precisely because software and the associated network effects are able to drive disproportionate amount of growth, unlike hardware. The further down the value chain in hardware the more commoditized you are.
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Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).