CircuitHub says The Grid, its factory-scale robot in Massachusetts, can deliver assembled circuit boards to a US address in four days. The company puts the median for a typical quick-turn shop in Shenzhen at nine days. "For thirty years the West accepted a trade-off: design here, build in China, and wait," said Andrew Seddon, founder and CEO of CircuitHub. "The Grid ends that trade-off."
CircuitHub backs the claim with a priced example. The board is a 4-layer motor controller with 118 parts per board, 38 of them unique. An order of five assembled boards, parts included, costs $630 on The Grid. The same order from a Shenzhen shop comes to about $465 once shipping and US tariffs are added. That is a $165 premium for boards that arrive five days sooner, which CircuitHub argues is a good trade for any team paying engineers to wait.
The architecture is what separates it from a conventional line. Levitating movers carry each board and its parts between machines that print solder paste, place components, reflow, solder and inspect. Learned models, AI agents and classic optimizers schedule the work, and every board takes its own route. CircuitHub says that removes changeovers and per-design setup, so one unit each of 100 designs runs as easily as 100 units of one design. Prototypes and production batches share the same machines.
For manufacturing and automation engineers, high-mix, low-volume work is where automation has historically stalled, because each new design means hours of setup. CircuitHub says 95 percent of electronics projects involve fewer than 10,000 units. The company says a leading EV maker, a top AI lab and several large tech companies already build on The Grid, and that customers also include developers of self-driving vehicles and satellites.
The Grid has run customer orders for five years and builds tens of millions of dollars of electronics a year, according to CircuitHub. Across the company, it has shipped more than 2.2 million boards, placed more than 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers. Demand is running ahead of supply, so CircuitHub plans to expand capacity fivefold this year, with another jump in 2027. In May, the company raised $28M led by Plural and Sten Tamkivi, bringing its total to $48M, to fund that growth. CircuitHub plans to open a factory in the United Kingdom in 2027.
