At Seedcamp, we’ve long believed that hardware is the next AI frontier.
Software engineering is completely unrecognisable to how it was even a few years ago. Anyone can now generate a website or a tool at the click of a button.
But hardware simply hasn’t caught up. Physical engineering is still fragmented, laborious and expensive.
Flow knew early that this was about to change. We’ve backed them for almost a decade, since Pari walked into Seedcamp HQ with a NASA t-shirt on and told us he could design rockets faster than anyone in the world. We’re proud to continue to back them today.
There’s a reason why software development has been easier to automate than hardware. In hardware engineering, a single design change can have dozens of unintended effects on mechanical, electrical and software systems. Teams have to coordinate updates in parallel, then verify that the entire system still meets millions of requirements and constraints, including regulatory standards.
Most teams are still managing this process manually, across a patchwork of spreadsheets, CAD files and legacy tools. But this is quickly becoming unsustainable. Today’s systems have become so complex that this work can no longer be feasibly done by hand. As Pari says: “Every hardware company now has to decide how fast it will adopt AI, and those that move first will win their markets.”
"Every hardware company now has to decide how fast it will adopt AI, and those that move first will win their markets."Pari Singh ~ Flow
This is where Flow comes in. Its AI agents continuously track changes, propagate updates across teams and verify the results in seconds. It’s able to cut hardware iteration cycles from months to days, allowing engineering teams to design systems more complex than anything built today, in a fraction of the time.
Since their Series A last October, Flow has added General Motors PPU, RV Tech (Rivian and Volkswagen’s joint venture), Anduril, Stoke Space, Intuitive Machines and Pacific Fusion as customers. They join Rivian, Joby Aviation, Astranis and Radiant Industries, which already use Flow as their default hardware development platform. Incredibly, 96% of Flow’s customer base came from inbound, a testament to how acute the need for Flow’s technology is.
“We evaluated 30 tools and nothing came close to Flow. It allows Rivian to develop faster, safer and better by bringing a collaborative approach to systems engineering,” said Scott Mackenzie, Rivian Director of Product Development, Process & Tools.
For Pari, his mission is personal. He became an engineer with dreams of inventing. Instead, most of his day went on soul-crushing “digital manual labour”: CAD, spreadsheets, simulations.
He believes that’s all about to change: “The engineer’s role will change more profoundly than at any point since the invention of CAD, with humans focusing on invention, architecture, tradeoffs and judgement calls, and agents taking the grunt work.”
Throughout our journey with Flow, one thing we’ve been consistently impressed by the strength of Flow’s organisation. Teams at Flow are small and elite, with ownership sitting with the engineers, and building taking place side-by-side with users. We couldn’t imagine a better team to define the next decade of Physical AI.
Flow are hiring across all roles. Check out vacancies here.
Listen to our podcast episode with Pari here.