Trace — The Fastest Way to Prototype Electronics

Electronics manufacturing & a desktop PCB assembly machine that allows engineers to go from design to functional PCBs in 1–2 days

When engineering teams build a hardware product, they need to design and develop two parts — mechanical and electronics.

Not very long ago, developing mechanical parts was a slow and frustrating process. Engineers had to choose between speed and cost as manufacturing one-off prototypes were expensive and it took weeks to get them back. Fast forward to today and engineers can manufacture prototypes in hours. 3D printing removed barriers and enabled engineers to iterate faster and more efficiently, which ultimately resulted in better product brought to market in less time.

Today, developing electronics is the bottleneck. Engineers still need weeks just to validate one idea.

As engineers ourselves, we’ve experienced the pain points of developing electronics first-hand. Specifically, we grew frustrated by the week-long wait times between designing a PCB and manufacturing functional prototypes. We tried every solution out there to speed up our process — from desktop PCB printers to the fastest local manufacturers, but we simply couldn’t iterate fast enough.

As we dove deeper to understand why prototype PCB manufacturing takes so long, we found that assembling a PCB is the biggest bottleneck.

Manufacturing PCBs is a 3-step process — you need to fabricate bare boards, source components, and assemble bare boards with components. Bare board fabrication is a parallel process where fabricators can manufacture several different orders at the same time and can fulfill an order in under a day. Component sourcing is fast as well — most distributors provide 1–2 day turns. But PCB assembly, the process where components are soldered on bare boards, is a serial process where factories can process only one order at a time and each order can take hours/days based on quantity. As a result, turnaround times depend on the order volume of your factory and can take anywhere between 2 days and 2 weeks.

That’s why we started Trace — the first and only manufacturer decentralizing prototype PCB assembly. We provide a machine that assembles PCBs on your desktop in 60 minutes and a manufacturing service that integrates seamlessly with your machine to allow you to go from design to functional PCBs as fast as the next day.

Here’s the experience we are building:

1. Upload your design files to get instant quotes and place order

2. Receive bare boards and components in a kit with unit-level tracking as fast as the next day

3. Insert kit into our desktop machine to assemble PCBs in under 60 minutes

And go right back to iterating on your designs.

We are building fundamentally new manufacturing infrastructure to make this experience possible.

First, through our manufacturing service, besides fabricating bare boards, we also source components and repackage them while tracking exactly where each component is placed — so you don’t have to deal with loose components and spend hours setting up our desktop machine.

Second, we’ve developed a machine that lets you automate PCB assembly on your desktop with just a few clicks. Our machine applies solder and precisely assembles components in under an hour, and is designed to enable a plug-and-play experience.

We are launching a private alpha in a few months and are excited to share our learnings and thinking as we make progress.

If this sounds interesting to you, join our waitlist here. We will reach out to you as we bring product to market.

Thanks!

You can reach me at gowtham@trace.industries if you’d like to connect.