ProvenMetal ships circuit boards in 7 days, built entirely in the US
Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks
ProvenMetal, a YC S26 startup, offers a seven-day standard turnaround for PCB fabrication and assembly, with no expedite fees. The entire build process—sourcing, fabrication, assembly, and testing—is managed in the US, eliminating offshore lag. Each board ships with a full quality record, and the service is aimed at drone and defense teams needing rapid iterations.
A board that takes three weeks kills a sprint.
- amirhirsch
Good luck! One valuable differentiation you could provide is a line of credit. If you can’t win on price, you can help your customers win on cash-conversion cycle.
I’ve been making hardware for 20 years. My highest-volume product was Flybrix, a LEGO drone kit manufactured by Seeed and UniPrecision in China and by Sparqtron in Fremont, California. I’d be happy to work with you on a v2 reboot: Flybrix Swarmz, because every American high school needs a drone swarm.
Beyond that, I’ve worked with many domestic suppliers and built ITAR-controlled products as well. Even without owning the production capacity, if you can offer Net 90 on fabrication and extend credit for components--beyond existing DigiKey, Arrow, Mouser, and vendor credit lines--then I can build products and get paid without putting all the capital at risk upfront.
Factoring is expensive, especially against a purchase order rather than an invoice, and I don’t know of anyone offering working-capital credit based solely on an SBIR award.
Credit is what makes the spice flow.
- anonymous_user9
> we have a heuristic harness that Fable 5 uses to check the board for DFM issues
So OpenAI gets a full copy of every customer board? I wish that was mentioned on the upload page.
- ac29
Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
- Animats
Is there a standard parts list of immediately available parts, like JLBPCB? [1]
- seizethecheese
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
- pbronez
It’s tricky to compete with your own suppliers. For example, see Microsoft’s dance with Dell & HP when they launched Surface. How do you plan to keep the CMs happy while you’re operating your own line?
- eaurouge
> Now, the need for a domestic PCB supply chain is higher than ever before, yet the infrastructure has been dissolving over the last 2 decades. What is left is mostly small family run manufacturers (CMs) that have been operating in largely the same, labor intensive way since the early 2000’s.
Would really like to see you guys succeed. We definitely need more manufacturers in the US. But this isn't quite true. Not now, and I'm not sure it's ever been the case in the two decades plus that I've been in hardware. Apart from manufacturers like Sierra Circuits in the Bay Area and Advanced PCB in Colorado that have been around all of that time, we had Tempo (in SF then but no longer), and now have MacroFab (Houston) and CircutHub (also YC, somewhere on the East Coast I think).
- jpatten
I hope you guys are successful because I would love to see more US options in this space. Realistically, you can get boards in 7 days from China, and competing with them on price seems like a challenge. So that leaves ITAR and people who need boards even faster. Sounds like that’s where you’re focusing your energy already.
What pick and place are you using now that you’ve moved on from the Neoden world?