Yassin Al-Yassin

Substrate is the agentic platform for that gap — chips, circuits, embedded systems, hardware. I'm building it because I'm one of the few founders fluent in both worlds.

I'm starting with Tracer: a verifiable copilot that helps engineers modernise legacy electronic circuits step by step, with the engineer checking each output. I picked this wedge because defence reshoring and supply-chain mandates have created urgent modernisation budgets, and frontier multimodal models can finally read schematics end-to-end.

The engineers I interviewed all said the same thing — they want a tool that works alongside them, not an autonomous black box that multiplies errors in high-stakes work.

Ship Tracer first as an assistant inside engineers' existing EDA tools — Altium, KiCad, Cadence — low friction, no behaviour change. From there it grows into a purpose-built modernisation platform that becomes the foundation other Substrate agents are built on.

Each engagement adds proprietary design data and engineer trust the next layer inherits. I led the team that built the core technical primitive at the AMD Pervasive AI Contest, where it placed 2nd of 100+ teams.