PreScalar has raised $7M in seed funding to give factories one system for testing devices, loading the built-in software, or firmware, that runs them and keeping a record of every unit that comes off the line. The San Francisco startup builds for makers of self-driving cars, robots, consumer electronics and defence equipment.
Dynamo Ventures, an early-stage investor in manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, co-led the round with BMW i Ventures, the venture capital firm backed by the BMW Group. Santosh Sankar, a managing partner at Dynamo, said:
“The most sophisticated hardware companies have spent years and enormous resources building this infrastructure themselves.” Everyone else, he added, has been left patching old tools together or starting from nothing.
Kasper Sage, a managing partner at BMW i Ventures, tied the deal to products that increasingly run on code.
“The best hardware companies in the world are defined by what comes off their production lines,” he said. He argued that once products are defined by their software, the factory tools that load, check and trace that code count for as much as the hardware itself.
When Firmware Changes Mid-Production
That code is where PreScalar says factories get stuck. Firmware often changes after parts have entered production or are already sitting in stock. Manufacturers may then have to reprogram those parts by hand or send them back to the maker, which adds delay and cost and leaves gaps in the record of what each unit is running.
Skyler Salman, PreScalar’s co-founder and chief executive, said the founders saw the problem first-hand in their earlier careers.
“Hardware has fundamentally changed, but the way we manufacture it hasn’t kept up,” he said. “We built PreScalar because we lived this problem ourselves.”
The company now plans to put the new money into research and development (R&D), into making more of its own hardware, into hiring and into taking its system to more factories. Blue Wire Capital, Uplift Ventures and Antler, a global early-stage investor, joined the two leads in the round.
Test Stations, Software And Data
A test station is the bench of instruments where a device is powered up, programmed and checked before it moves on. PreScalar makes modular stations of this kind and pairs them with software that rolls out and updates test steps and firmware across a factory, which the company says can happen without stopping the line. It also says nothing has to be installed on the device being tested.
PreScalar wants its platform to replace the scattered tools factories now use for testing, firmware updates and production data. Larger suppliers are making a similar case on the machine side, with Mitsubishi Electric selling machine tools, robots and software as one connected system for machine shops.
Customers can begin with a single station and add more along the line. Teams with their own test scripts can keep running them on their own Linux-based equipment, with PreScalar managing the runs and logging the results, or they can use PreScalar’s hardware and programming kits. Tests reach factory sites as containers, self-contained software packages, so the sites never see a customer’s source code.
The platform logs pass and fail results, readings over time and each unit’s genealogy, the history of the parts and code that went into it. Engineers can pull that data with GraphQL, a widely used language for querying data, or use PreScalar’s dashboards.
PreScalar says it already works with fast-growing technology companies as well as large global manufacturers, though it has not named any. New customers can run a pilot in their own factory and pay nothing until it is complete, the company says, and if they walk away it removes its equipment and leaves them the data.
End-Of-Line Checks For Car Electronics
Car and electronics makers commonly run end-of-line tests, a final check of each finished unit before it leaves the line. In one such system, built by the engineering firm DMC for an automotive client’s drivetrain control unit, the station first flashed, or loaded, firmware onto each unit. It then simulated sensor signals and electrical loads, read back the unit’s internal data and judged it pass or fail.
PreScalar wants stations like that to be something a factory can update like software, rather than a fixed rig built around one product. Its founders spent years on the other side of that problem, inside companies bringing new hardware into production.
Founders From Cruise, Waymo And Rivian
Salman led testing at Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving car unit, and at Rivian, Waymo and Google. The company’s blog says he has spent 15 years in hardware manufacturing, test automation and new product launches.
John Cathcart, the chief operating officer, has taken vehicles into production at Chrysler, Lucid, SF Motors and Cruise, where he led the programme for the Origin driverless vehicle. Ben Fredrickson, the chief technology officer, shipped safety-critical software at the surgical robotics company Auris Health, at Remedy Robotics and at Cruise.
The three founded PreScalar in 2025. When the company came out of stealth in March, it said it was working with robotics and electronics manufacturers to put the platform into real production settings.
PreScalar has not named a customer or published results from its pilots, so the gains it describes rest on its own word. It does have two lead investors close to manufacturing and the car industry, and founders who helped bring self-driving and electric vehicles into production.
Its bet is that as more products run on code, factories will want to test, update and track that code on the line with the same system that checks the hardware.
