Substrate
AI agents for the physical world.
Every great AI company is being built for software developers. The engineers who design the physical world were left behind.
Chips, circuits, embedded systems, hardware — the foundations everything else runs on.
The people who design them still work in tools from the 1990s. They read schematics by hand, trace nets across pages from memory, and modernise decades-old designs with almost no leverage from the AI revolution happening one floor up.
It isn't a small niche. It's the entire substrate beneath modern technology — and it's been structurally skipped.
Building this needs someone fluent in both worlds. Almost no one is.
To build AI for hardware you have to actually understand electronics and modern machine learning. Those two populations barely overlap.
I'm a second-year Electronic Engineering student who has spent two years building and shipping AI products. That combination is the whole thesis. The software-AI world is building for software; the hardware world can't build the tools it wishes existed. I sit on both sides of that wall.
Read: The knowledge wallTracer — a verifiable copilot for legacy circuit modernisation.
A wedge you can win beats a platform you can only describe. Tracer helps engineers modernise legacy electronic circuits step by step — with the engineer checking every output.
Read the circuit
Tracer ingests a legacy schematic and infers what each component is, what the sub-circuits do, and what the whole design is functionally for. This understanding layer is the genuinely hard part — and the primitive my team built at the AMD contest.
Propose, step by step
It suggests a modernisation one verifiable step at a time — never an autonomous black box that multiplies errors in high-stakes work.
Engineer verifies
Each output is inspectable and reversible. The engineer stays in command; trust compounds with every confirmed step.
Ships inside their tools
Tracer lands as an assistant inside the EDA tools engineers already use — Altium, KiCad, Cadence. Low friction, no behaviour change required.
Three things are true at once.
Models can finally see
Frontier multimodal models can now read schematics end to end. The inputs are no longer the bottleneck they were even a year ago.
Budgets are urgent
Defence reshoring and supply-chain mandates have created real, time-pressured budgets for modernising legacy electronics.
Engineers are ready
Every engineer I interviewed wants a tool that works alongside them — not one that replaces their judgement. The demand is shaped and waiting.
From wedge to platform.
Tracer
A verifiable modernisation copilot inside engineers' existing EDA tools. Win the wedge; earn the trust and the data.
Modernisation EDA
Tracer grows into a purpose-built modernisation platform — the foundation other Substrate agents are built on.
The Substrate agents
Schematic, Embedded, and beyond — a family of agents for everyone who designs the physical world.
Every engagement makes the next one harder to beat.
Each modernisation Tracer touches adds proprietary design data and engineer trust that the next layer inherits.
Data the rest of the market can't get. Trust a black box can't earn. The platform doesn't just grow — it gets structurally more defensible with use.
What Cursor is to software, Substrate is being built to be for everyone who designs the physical world.