Interview: Pari Singh of Flow Engineering on bringing AI to hardware development
After a $50m Series B at a $750m valuation, Flow's founder explains why he thinks hardware design cycles are about to shrink as dramatically as software's have.
In conversationPari Singhfounder and chief executive of Flow Engineering
Pari Singh is a mechanical engineer who set out to fix the least glamorous part of building physical products: keeping requirements, designs, simulations, code and test results consistent with one another as a programme changes. His San Francisco company, Flow Engineering, sells a systems engineering platform on which software agents watch for changes across a hardware programme, trace their impact and check whether requirements still hold. Its customers include Rivian, Anduril, Joby Aviation, Stoke Space, Astranis and Radiant, and since its Series A it has added General Motors' PPU division and RV Tech, the joint venture of Rivian and Volkswagen.
On 30 September Flow announced a $50m Series B at a $750m valuation, co-led by Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners, and Gavin Baker, managing partner of Atreides Management. Sequoia Capital, which led the Series A, took part again, and Roelof Botha, formerly of Sequoia, joined the board as an independent director with his own money. The company says it will spend the capital on what it calls an AI harness that lets frontier models work securely with sensitive engineering data, on more engineers and salespeople, and on FedRAMP authorisation for regulated customers. The round matters beyond one company: it is a bet by investors with deep Tesla and SpaceX ties that engineering software, rather than the hardware itself, is where the next large productivity gain in manufacturing will be captured.
Answers are drawn from Pari Singh's public remarks; sources are linked below.
How do you describe where Flow stands after this round?
Every hardware company now has to decide how fast it will adopt AI, and those that move first will win their markets. Flow has emerged as the de facto platform for agentic hardware. Ninety-six percent of our customers come to Flow inbound. The category leaders in each hardware vertical (space, automotive, defense, energy, etc.) are now built on Flow.
Software teams have already been transformed by AI. Why has hardware not kept pace?
Yeah, hardware engineering is an order of magnitude if not two more complex than software engineering. So if you look at a modern hardware product, anything from a smart watch to a spaceship, it requires mechanical, electrical, software, regulatory, test engineers to all collaborate together. Because it is so much more complex, it requires a fundamentally different approach.
Your training is in mechanical engineering rather than software. How has that shaped the company and the team?
I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and I became an engineer cause I wanted to build machines that matters for the world. I wanted to design rockets and airplanes and cars and nuclear reactors…
Our team is really built around the culture founded at Skunkworks. So we believe in very, very small, lean, sharp teams with high ownership, and we iterate on a nearly daily basis.
What does that mean for the working life of an engineer?
When I became an engineer, I wanted to invent. In reality, 90% of the day to day execution work (CAD, excel, sim) was digital manual labour. That's about to flip. The engineer's role will change more profoundly than at any point since the invention of CAD, with humans focusing on invention, architecture, tradeoffs and judgement calls, and agents taking the grunt work.
One day, this shift won't just enable us to iterate faster, it will enable us to design a class of products that we could not have dreamt of before.
What evidence of demand can you point to?
It's been explosive. So we are growing insanely quickly, both in terms of the number of customers that are coming to Flow, but also in terms of the usage that is happening on Flow… A year ago, our largest customer had about a million requirements on Flow, which is pretty large. Today, our largest customers have something like 100 million items in Flow.
Will established manufacturers, not only the new wave of hardware companies, adopt tools like yours?
…We see this as a new era for hardware development and a new wave of companies. These companies really care about time to market, they really care about iteration speed, and they really care about designing complex systems that are both software and hardware integrated together. Now this new wave, and this new era of hardware companies, are selecting AI and tools like Flow to be able to power their iteration speed, and companies that choose to adopt AI and move faster have a huge competitive advantage.
…In the legacy world there are gonna be companies that adopt early… and there are companies that might take a little bit longer, but I think we're gonna see the competitive advantage on the companies that move fastest to adopt AI.
What role does AI play in hardware engineering today, and where does it go next?
In hardware engineering, AI is starting by being an orchestrator and an integrator. So the single biggest problem in hardware engineering companies is the problem of integration. How you get all these different teams to work together seamlessly. But over the next two years, we're going to see AI move from integration to automation. We're going to go from an AI systems engineer where Flow is today to AI mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineers.
Will hardware development ever move at the speed of software?
I think it's inevitable that hardware catches up with software. One of our customers designs reusable rockets. Right now they can turn a design around in six or nine months. We're working with them to go from six or nine months to six to nine days. Once we're able to do that, once we're able to take the design of something really meaningfully complex and iterate it in one to two weeks, the world is going to look very, very different.
Sources
- Flow Engineering: Press Release: Flow Engineering Raises $50M Series B at $750M Valuation to Make Hardware Iteration as Fast as Software
- Flow Engineering: Letter from Pari: Hardware's AI Moment Has Arrived
- Flow Engineering: Bloomberg: Flow Engineering Raises $50M to Bring AI to Hardware (Bloomberg Tech interview and transcript)
- Yahoo Finance: Flow Engineering CEO Pari Singh: We're 'De Facto Platform for Agentic Hardware'
Filed under Startups. Written by Invest Times Editorial under our editorial standards. Commentary and analysis for information only, not investment advice.
