Artifact

Artifact develops a collaborative electrical system design (ECAD) platform for hardware engineering teams. The product lets users build a parts library (creating parts, bulk-uploading from CSV, or pulling from Artifact's public library with reusable pinouts and metadata), draw system schematics by dragging in devices and connecting pins, and then autogenerate harness drawings, pin tables and bills of materials that stay synchronized with the design as fidelity increases. Drawings can be edited to add wire lengths, annotations and treatments such as zipties and overbraid, and outputs can be exported as BOMs, pinout tables and harness drawings.

The tool includes electrical verification features — electrical rules checks and project rules checks intended to catch design errors before a system is built — plus advanced parameters and net traceability. Design history is tracked through branching, snapshots and frozen releases, and multi-layered views are provided via nested Design Blocks and a Navigation Map that shows a system at several levels of fidelity along with inter-system dependencies. Users can trace a net through mated connectors to view pinouts and datasheets during troubleshooting. Artifact links bidirectionally to 3D CAD systems and supports uploading PCB pinouts, adding COTS components and creating custom components.

Y Combinator's profile describes Artifact more broadly as a collaborative, AI-native IDE for hardware engineers spanning design, procurement, manufacturing, integration, test and sustainment, with an AI datasheet parser that generates pinouts and an emphasis on auto-generated, traceable artifacts tied to a single source of truth. Alongside the flagship Electrical System Designer, the company publishes an engineering toolbox including a Roadmap Planner for milestone and development-cost tracking, with additional project-management, electrical/RF and test-data tools listed as planned.

Founding story

Co-founders Antony Samuel and Corbin Klett previously worked together on high-speed aircraft and jet engine development, where, by their account, electrical designs were captured in photographs of whiteboards. That experience motivated them to build the electrical design tooling they lacked. Samuel is an electrical engineer with eight years developing avionics and software for aerospace systems and was previously Avionics Lead at Hermeus, where he built the team and infrastructure behind avionics for a Mach 5 aircraft. Klett holds an aerospace engineering PhD from Georgia Tech, where he applied control theory research to robotic systems, and worked on design and embedded software for a high-speed aircraft prototype before co-founding the company.

Business model

Artifact sells access to a hosted software design platform; the website markets trials and access requests, offers unlimited viewer licenses alongside collaborative editing, and supports customer-cloud and GovCloud deployments and API-based integrations for regulated customers.

The website references trials, licensing that includes unlimited viewer licenses, and customer-hosted or GovCloud installations, indicating a paid software subscription for design seats.

Traction

The company's site reports use by 16 or more companies and more than 116,000 wires connected, and states that customers include aerospace and defense organizations operating under NDA as well as ITAR- and CUI-compliant installations for aerospace and DoD customers.

Latest developments

In August 2025 the company announced a $3.5M raise to modernize electrical system design. Its website reports usage across 16+ companies and 116k+ wires, and it lists an engineering toolbox with a live Roadmap Planner and Electrical System Designer plus a set of planned tools (failure modes analysis, RACI tracker, wire gauge, link budget and resistor divider calculators, data viewer and FFT calculator) that visitors can vote on.