▲ 237 points

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

provenmetal.com

by willcarkner·10d ago·156 comments·view on hn ↗

Hey HN, we’re Will & Johnny from ProvenMetal (https://provenmetal.com). You send us design files or specs and we give you assembled boards domestically in days.

The US produced 30% of PCBs globally in 2000, now they produce 4%. Chinese manufacturers have completely dominated this space at 55% of global production.

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.

When you place an order through a CM it typically takes several days to receive a quote and complete design for manufacture review, and then you have to source all of the components (the hardest part) and bare boards yourself, then wait anywhere from a few days to several weeks for the assembly and testing of those boards.

We started off assembling circuit boards out of a garage with prosumer grade equipment (NeoDen YY1, Glenbrook X-ray, solder paste stencils, and manual rework stations). We believed that by owning the manufacturing process, we could turn all the front of house automations inwards. But here’s the thing… manufacturing circuit boards with prosumer grade equipment out of a garage takes a huge amount of time. Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business. We were completely capacity constrained, with fancy software automations that are not the binding constraint at low volumes.

Then we got our heads out of the weeds, took a step back, and realized that we were trying to solve the wrong bottlenecks.

These manufacturers are good at manufacturing and terrible at the front of house (quoting, DFM review, and part procurement). When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck. So we stopped trying to solve the problem that we can’t solve at this stage.

We measured the bottlenecks and nailed down the ones that we are best positioned to solve right now.

When a customer wants a domestically manufactured circuit board, it is not a straight forward process. We are making that process easy through front of house automation. A customer gives us their design files, and we automatically procure components, and co-ordinate bare board fabs and assembly houses to get quotes, design review, and manufacturing completed in a very tight loop.

How we solve part procurement (you can’t assemble boards with no parts!): When a user places an order with us, our system automatically sources their bill of materials across US and overseas distributors. However, when we work with customers during the design process, our plug-ins interact with KiCAD and Altium, sending the BOM to our ordering platform, which allows us to automatically procure components before layout is finalized.

KiCAD plugin: (https://github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-kicad)

Altium plugin: (https://github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-altium)

This enables us to order long lead time parts in advance, suggest alternatives if parts are out of stock, and solve the biggest bottleneck in the process. We store parts in our hq in SF, and then kit the boards and route them through our network. We also do long term storage of parts for long lead time items.

How we solve endless emails: Every manufacturer wants the same information in a different shape. There’s usually a few days of back and forth emailing to achieve clarity. We’re building a profile per manufacturer and sending the order to fit their requirements. This may sound trivial but it removes a multi-day round trip on most orders, which on a quick-turn build is a meaningful share of the time.

How to solve design review: Each manufacturer has individual capability sheets, and so we have a heuristic harness that Fable 5 uses to check the board for DFM issues. We’re building a streamlined process for end-to-end pcb manufacturing, but is that enough to solve the supply chain? Not a chance. Capacity is the problem, and no amount of smart software will solve it. We’re extracting real slack from the system today, that slack is finite, and at some volume the only remaining move is adding physical capacity. We think that’s where this goes.

We charge a simple margin on the order value depending on order complexity with fully transparent quote breakdowns. We took our first paying order in less than a week and we’ve done roughly $70k across 11 orders in 6 weeks.

We are very interested in your opinion. We’re working in a problem space that has problems everywhere, we’re constantly pulled in wild directions regarding which problems we solve and how we go about solving them. What do you know that we can learn from?

156 comments

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.

Wow. Sounds like a super interesting product. Hadn't considered lines of credit yet, but definitely would be valuable to some higher ticket customers.

Sad to see the Lego drone sold out, hope you get that reboot going!

Credit based on a SBIR is a great idea. Seems like something the Small Business Administration should offer.

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).

Think of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment

More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.

The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...

Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.

It's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.

I'll hijack this point to talk about robotics - I think we agree 1) It's not ideal for China to control production for _all_ of the things we use here.

2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because of domain knowledge & ecosystem

3) The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate (and intentional government investment)

4) The only way around this is for the US to invest into robotics (labor) & subsidize american manufacturing (ecosystem)

It will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.

This is essentially the problem with a lot of US fabs. Many exist only as a technicality for the defense industry to make things domestically. This means they get the "$1,000 hammer" margins. When you approach them for a prototype, they essentially don't want your business.

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.

This is an exciting project! My main feedback: you can definitely tell the website content is AI-generated. It's okay to vibe code the design, but I really hesitate when I see vibed writing.

Love the energy, but I can hardly believe the title "Proven Metals" because your website does not stand up to basic scrutiny:

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

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?

When you say PCB at the beginning are you referring to raw PCBs or PCBAs? Presumably your service will be sourcing raw PCBs from China still and just doing PCBA?

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.

This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.

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.

> Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business

> 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?

I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.

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.

If you can get to JLCPCB levels of automation (in their fab) and produce a better frontend experience (shouldn't be too hard, JLC's is awful but still one of the better ones) then that will be amazing! North America desperately needs something like this. Good luck!

> 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).

Last autumn we sourced boards (both fab and assembly) in the US. The vendors I’d used in the past in MV and Sunnyvale are gone but some folks are still around. Getting the boards made was slow for the reasons you said but the real problem was the parts: by mid summer 2025 the supply chains had become so disrupted that getting parts from mouser and digi-key was difficult. Design in a part with 6000 in inventory only to find by the time you ordered there were none because someone had scooped them all, unclear when they’d be replenished. Managing, connectors that didn’t match the datasheet. Etc.

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

I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.

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

I think this is a huge opportunity — speed, domestic production _and_ overall usability of the process - i do think appearing serious business matters a lot in this space, i found your site a little lacking in terms of prose, details, etc. Really great idea though.

This looks like it has a long way to go before it is usable. Clicking 'Capabilities' largely just gives me the 7 day turn spiel again, while I'd expect something about min trace / space, HDI capabilities, number of layers, any fancy laminates, etc. For assembly I'd need to know more about min pitch / package size, available types of solder paste, etc. If you're doing PCB sourcing AND assembly (like it sounds like in the text here), that is not clear on the site.

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.

Congrats on launch! Have you considered providing engineering consulting as a part of the package? We always started with an amazing CM here in the US and scaled manufacturing in China. We usually spent more with our US CM to go 0 -> 1 -> 500 than what we paid the Chinese manufacturer to go from 500 -> 100,000. He was an amazing guy with consultants sitting at every aspect of the process. We would not have succeeded without the us CM.

I always thought there was a business in making that consulting easy to find. Its usually a very hard thing to find good consultants.

Is there a standard parts list of immediately available parts, like JLBPCB? [1]

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

Does the 7 day turnaround hold up for more complex boards (8-12 layers, laser drilled, blind micro-vias etc.)? Not looking for a detailed quote - just a hand waving answer.

I'm in the UK and we have our own electronics assembly but the actual PCBs are made elsewhere. Lead time on a bare board almost seems to be a direct multiple of the number of layers, however much you are willing to pay. Our ability to design and build prototypes has got faster and faster on some projects, but having the board made is the limiting immovable factor.

I'm trying to find your capabilities. I.e trace and space minimums, hole to edge minimums, min annular ring, etc. Are you not at that stage yet? Will you ever publish a standard spec?

I'm super excited to try your service and the KiCad plug-in to move supply-chain dialogue closer to point-of-creation makes a TON of sense. That and the speed seem to be the two points of differentiation from Macrofab, who is my current supplier. They will be stiff competition for you as they are a great shop and have a good software interface and a lot of capabilities. I imagine using you guys for quick turn-around needs and them for production and scale?

Nice but the USA are not our global friends anymore.

Anything available in the EU?

> 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.

You guys should really be making an end to end PCB machine, sourcing the parts and part inventory for custom PCBs really should be the responsibility of the end user.

I just had a board come in (domestic) after I think a few months. We're repeatedly running into issues with quoting and manufacturing taking ages. Especially quoting. We do our assembly in house though so I'm not concerned about that, but also we're usually (though not always) incredibly low volume so board houses don't like us.

We (tscircuit) are trying to develop a PCB fabrication method that's compatible with US regulation (i.e. a dry process without etchants)- we're seeing awesome results using UV lasers [1]. Would love to chat sometime!

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

1. Do you fabricate in-house, or through partner fabs? If partners, where are they located?

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.

Congratulations!

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.

A very welcome service! Here's a request: I haven't tried the process, so maybe you do, but if you don't offer a variety of PCB materials you will potentially lose opportunity in the mmWave space where antennas are printed on the PCB so the material must be from a subset of those material that are available overall.

Drone and defense teams get boards back in 7 days.

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...

Each of these pretty established suppliers offer this service:

- 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 "Capabilities" section was not what I was expecting. Layers, via sizing, HDI - where's the details?

#1: How does this compare in price, parts lib, features etc to JLC? Obviously the price and parts avail will be a challenge.

#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.

I don't know whether you're looking at small-to-medium batch indie stuff, or big customers, but if it's the former I'd reach out to Josh Lifton from Crowd Supply. Surprisingly accessible guy and this would be a great fit for them.

Curious how the pricing compares to overseas fabs once you factor in the 7-day turn — is that gap closing enough for non-defense teams to switch too, or is this mainly aimed at people who need the domestic supply chain regardless of cost?

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?

Cool! I wish there was a way to print boards for hobby purposes. What is the lowest price you would work with? Ballpark

JLCPCB can make boards in less than 7 days easily and for non drone and defense companies.

Big congratulations Will. Eager to try when I'm over next

Any resources to learn how to design a circuit board?