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

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.

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).

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.