Colare raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding to scale a simulation-based screening platform for hardware engineers, the company said October 26. The round includes Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures, per the announcement.
Esther Thomas, co-founder and co-CEO of Colare, said hardware teams still screen with proxies that miss whether someone can actually do the job and that one wrong hire can mean a failed launch or lost contract. She framed Colare as a way to turn senior engineer intuition into assessments that scale across hundreds of candidates, and she pointed to aerospace manufacturing attrition and an aging workforce as pressure on hiring.
Nain Abdi, the other co-founder and co-CEO and a former electrical engineer at Ford, said his team stopped trusting resumes when strong-looking candidates struggled technically. He said Colare maps a job description to simulations across CAD, PCB design, thermal analysis, FEA and systems problem solving, then evaluates process and output with rubrics informed by engineers who have shipped hardware. The company said half its early clients are in aerospace and defense, from seed-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar manufacturers, and cited a space customer adding up to 50 roles a month.
John Slack, chief executive of Rhoic, a two-person chemical manufacturing startup cited by Colare, said neither founder is an electrical engineer and they did not know what good looked like in an answer. He said Colare became the technical layer they lacked and let them see how candidates approach real work earlier. Dr Thomas Otter, general partner at Acadian Ventures, said the firm backed Colare because robotics and physical AI are driving demand to assess electrical, mechanical and mechatronic skills fairly.
The announcement quantifies the pain, roughly 40 hours of senior engineer time per hire and about 3,800 aerospace openings a year through 2031 per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and notes $35.6 billion in aerospace and defense funding in the first half of 2026.
The company says it evaluates both process and final output and handles scheduling, and The Next Web described the pitch as testing hardware candidates with simulations of real tasks aimed at saving senior engineers’ interview time. Daily.dev also syndicated the $2.5M raise to its developer audience, a distribution detail not in the company announcement.
Colare said the $2.5M will go toward scaling its simulation platform. Dr Thomas Otter, general partner at Acadian Ventures, said robotics and physical AI are driving demand to assess electrical, mechanical and mechatronic skills.
