Key takeaways ▼
AJ Cooper is the Co-Founder and CEO of Itera, which developed the first-of-its-kind ‘fluid’ circuit board to make electronics physically programmable. Chips and software have been programmable for decades, but the interconnect between them has stayed fixed. By rewiring itself in real time, Itera’s board challenges this notion by enabling engineers to validate and iterate on real hardware in minutes.
With a PhD in electrical engineering, AJ’s career began by developing semiconductor equipment for companies like GlobalFoundries (NASDAQ: GFS) and infrared night vision processes for FLIR. He then co-founded luxury smartwatch company Olio, building custom displays, touch panels, batteries and PCBs at scale. At Uber (NASDAQ: UBER), AJ spearheaded hardware innovation for the bikes and scooters division, later becoming the Director of Hardware for Lyft’s (NYSE: LYFT) bikeshare hardware team, whose products are used by millions of riders, including New York City’s Citibike system.
Tell us about your company?
Itera is on a mission to help engineers get electronic designs right before they build their first prototype. We developed the ‘fluid’ circuit board, the first of its kind, which rewires itself in real time. We don’t provide simulations; engineers using our board test real components with actual electrical behavior. On top of that, our board provides dramatically more observability than a traditional printed circuit board (PCB) because any internal node can be probed.
How does it work?
Compared to a traditional PCB with etched copper, the fluid board uses liquid metal on glass substrates. Electrowetting is used so the traces can be redrawn to match a new design in under a minute.
The closest analogy is e-paper: each pixel is either metal or not, and it stays in place when the control power is off, because microscopic structures hold the metal in place. The board uses real components, so engineers measure actual electrical behavior instead of a simulation’s best guess. Components attach with conductive paste instead of reflow, so swapping one part on an assembled board does not mean starting over.
What problems are you solving?
We’re solving the hardware validation bottleneck that engineers have no other choice but to treat as a cost of doing business. It’s the same challenge my co-founders and I faced throughout our careers.
If you’ve worked within or adjacent to the validation cycle, this will sound familiar: you send a design to an overseas fab house, and it arrives weeks later. You excitedly test the prototype and discover a design flaw, so you spin up a new one and order another fab. You wait another few weeks. If you’re lucky, the cycle only repeats itself 3 times, but if you’ve been in the industry long enough, you’ve lived through 6-10 attempts. Many months later, you can finally move the product to production.
Our board compresses a months-long process into days, and potentially faster if you’re using an AI-assisted EDA tool.
What application areas are your strongest?
PCBs are ubiquitous across electronics, so we’re best equipped to help anyone who can benefit from reducing the cost of being wrong to zero. From medical devices to military electronics to countless other applications, many contribute to the $50 billion spent annually on hardware development and validation.
Today, a top 5 global auto OEM and defense neoprimes have reserved our production capacity. We’re also talking with hyperscalers and chipset manufacturers.
What keeps your customers up at night?
The exorbitant time and money lost during validation. The privilege of being a hardware engineer is the opportunity to bring the next big thing to life: something designed to help or protect others, something that will be used and appreciated by millions of people or will otherwise change the world. Being caught in validation limbo quite literally makes it impossible, not just difficult, to build as fast as your ambition demands. We started Itera so engineers can be excited about waking up the next morning, one where they can test their latest board design before finishing their coffee.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
There’s no direct competitor in fluid circuit technology because we’ve created a new category. The only alternatives are traditional PCB fabrication, which takes weeks per iteration, and simulation software, which is faster but can’t capture real component behavior. We’re not incrementally better than either one; we’ve closed the gap between testing accuracy and iteration speed that’s constrained hardware development for decades.
What new features/technology are you working on?
Electronics are programmable everywhere except for the physical interconnect, and we’re going to change that. The concept of physical programmability sounds like it’s drawn from science fiction, but we’ve shown it’s now achievable. Our process innovation is the foundation needed to get there, and we’re excited to share more about hardware that can change itself after deployment.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
We operate under an electronics-as-a-service model. Rather than selling hardware that sits in an engineering lab, we operate secure U.S.-based testing centers where customers get remote access to what we call their ‘Configurable Twin.’
We designed Itera with zero adoption friction in mind: engineers upload the same files they’d send to any PCB manufacturer using their existing EDA tools, and they get remote access to hardware with their existing IDEs and test interfaces forwarded seamlessly. They don’t need to understand new applications or file formats. We pull from our inventory of glass and liquid metal substrates, pick and place their components, and compile the routing to match their layout. They then get remote desktop access to every signal they’d normally need: UART, USB, Ethernet, SD card, and a camera above the board so they can bring the board up as if it’s sitting on the desk next to them.
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