Our Story

We build pickaxes for engineers that design hardware.

We passionately believe three things:

• 1. Better tools will result in thousands upon thousands of better products.
• 2. Collaboration matters: Great products don't get built through isolation, but through community.
• 3. Engineering, like all professions, is moving to the cloud.

And so it follows that our story is about trying to raise the bar. We have all worked as professional engineers. We have all designed real physical products. And we hated our tools. Eventually we just couldn't take it anymore. We thought we could do better. And so we quit our real-people jobs and founded a startup with the goal of building absolutely the best tools for designing schematics, laying out PCBs, managing parts, simulating, verifying, and prototyping.

Pickaxes for hardware engineers.

Upverter was founded in the summer of 2010 by three University of Waterloo computer & electrical engineers with a very simple goal: to build the best tools. We want to make hardware easier to do. We wanted to see more hardware startups. And we were sick of seeing scanned in schematics. We believe Eagle has been holding the hobbyists of the world back, and we want to see it die. We believe that Cadence is evil, and that no software on the planet is worth $100,000.00 a seat, and certainly not theirs.

We spent our first year building the world's first CAD tools in a web browser. There was a schematic editor, real-time collaboration, a small community, and an open source file format. We did YC. We launched our first product. We found our vision. And we raised a little money to bring our dream to life. We started the year as three friends in a parent's basement. We ended the year as a real company, with seven employees and thousands of customers.

We spent our second year building the world's first collaborative layout tools, the first cloud simulation, and the first insanely accessible electronics prototyping. We stretched the boundaries of our original product into what are very likely the best ideation, collaboration, and logical design tools ever created. We grew the community and we enabled them to start dozens of new companies, and thousands of new products.

And in the last 6 months, we've launched our second product. Grown the team. Sold copies into the enterprise world. Doubled the community. And hosted epic hackathons, with some pretty epic results.

It's still the early days for us. We think we've built some of the best tools in the world for designing hardware, but as long as people are engineering products, we're going to be trying to make it easier.

If you engineer hardware, you should give our tools a try. They will probably do most of what you need, and we'll cut your design cycle in half. And if they don't do what you need, just let us know - you'll help us decide what to work on next.