Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

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.

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).

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.

Never again. Chinese shops are faster than US manufacturing. And they take Digikey and mouser part numbers.

1) First issue: I do not know what your manufacturing constraints are for PCBs...the number of layers is not documented. I don't even know if you support FlexPCBs.

2) I suppose I could figure out if you could make my boards in seven days if I played your upload game...but I should have to do that. Even the following site, with its clunky UI, makes it more clear what they can or can't do: https://quickturnpcb.co.kr/

3) You say you ship "tested" boards, but what does that mean? Firmware testing? Emissions testing? If you ultimately choose the MPNs, does that mean you own the failures if the board doesn't come up?

4) It's not clear if you accept consigned parts. It's not even clear if you are properly storing the parts you are kitting with respect MSL, ESD, etc.

5) In the end, what makes you any different from a typical broker like Millenium Circuits Limited? (Not that I am endorsing them, as I have had terrible experience from them as well)

6) If you are owning testing and promising quick turnarounds, I would assume you are actually shipping test fixtures to the CM before they ship so they can rework if necessary. But again unclear from your description

2. Can you do 6-layer 1+4+1 HDI - laser microvias (0.100 mm), stacked microvias over buried vias, sequential lamination?

3. Can you do via-in-pad fill and planarize (Type VII / VIPPO)? I have ~218 vias on one board needing it.

4. What's your minimum copper-to-copper clearance? Can you do 0.075 mm with a waiver.

When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.

Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.

[1] https://jlcpcb.com/parts/in-stock-parts

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).

> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.

I’m confused, which one is it?

I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?

Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?

This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.

Also, for slow old industries (like Automotive), you'd likely need a fast way to coordinate NDAs just to get an engineer to be allowed to share the design files with you.

I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.

I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.

[1] https://x.com/seveibar/status/2085438976622780654?s=20

Quick turn in the US is 2 to 4 days.[1] That's expensive but available.

[1] https://www.surfacemountsolutions.com/services/quick-turn-pc...

#2: Is this accessible for hobbyists, prototypes, small companies etc, or is it a service for gov/mil stuff that isn't allowed to use China? (Blue UAS etc)

I'm excited and would love to order a board.

So OpenAI gets a full copy of every customer board? I wish that was mentioned on the upload page.

Anything available in the EU?

Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.

We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.

We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.

- Sunstone

- Advanced Assembly

- Sierra Circuits

- Osh Park

They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.

Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?

I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.

The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.

Oh