UK Circuit Board Design Startup Circuit Mind Raises $25M, Launches AI Schematic Verification Engine
Circuit Mind announces a $25M funding round led by Norwest and simultaneously releases the Agentic Verification Engine (AVE) for automated PCB schematic error checking.
UK-based circuit board design startup Circuit Mind Ltd. announced on October 28, 2026, that it has raised $25 million in new funding to extend its artificial intelligence platform across more stages of the hardware design process. The company also launched a new tool called the Agentic Verification Engine (AVE), which uses AI agents to automatically hunt for errors in circuit schematics.
Circuit Mind's core business involves automating much of the manual work behind printed circuit board (PCB) design. According to the company, engineers can spend more than a year on a new piece of hardware, partly reading datasheets that run to thousands of pages, with mistakes often remaining hidden until a physical prototype is built and tested. Circuit Mind argues that general-purpose large language models are not up to the task on their own because they have never been trained on professionally designed circuits. Its platform layers AI agents over a patented, physics-based engine that tests each design decision against electrical limits.
The newly launched AVE hands design review work to a swarm of AI agents. Working from component datasheets and any review checklists loaded by customers, these agents trace every connection and bus in the circuit to find mismatches with pin tables or operating voltages. Nothing reaches an engineer until the system has critiqued its own findings.
Regarding customer results, Circuit Mind cites a public report from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, stating that lab engineers finished a medium-difficulty board in just over four hours using its design application, compared to an estimated 60 to 80 hours by hand. Daniel Gheno, Chief Technology Officer for Energy Management at Schneider Electric SE, said early evaluations point to a cut of more than 90% in the effort spent exploring electronic architectures. Charlie Eastberg, Director of Hardware Engineering at Emerson Electric Co., confirmed that both applications sped up his team's move from system architecture to schematic.