CELUS Raises €25M in Series A Funding

CELUS uses machine learning to reduce laborious, time-consuming engineering and composition times for circuit diagram, board design and component selection.

 

CELUS, the German deep tech company that uses AI to streamline circuit board engineering, has raised a €25M Series A funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from DI Capital and existing investors Speedinvest and Plug and Play.

Sir John Rose (former CEO of Rolls Royce); Sir Peter Bonfield (Chairman of TSMC and NXP); Carl-Peter Forster (CEO of Opel, GM Europe, and Tata Motors); Paul Gojenola (Electronic Engineering Lead at Google); Martina Koederitz (former CEO IBM Germany and DACH, & former IBM Global Industrial Managing Director); and finally Koenraad Crooijmans (former Investment Banker at Morgan Stanley) who also supported the company on the round.

CELUS’ vision is to open up new levels of efficiency and quality assurance to electronic engineering professionals, distributors, and component manufacturers alike. Within every electronic product (from toothbrushes to television sets, computers to coffee machines) exists a circuit board containing hundreds to thousands of tiny hardware components – each with their own specifications, price and availability.

Until now, circuit boards have been designed manually using an engineer’s experiential knowledge and their research of necessary components. This leads to very complex, time-consuming, and iterative design cycles to get to the final design and component selection.

CELUS has developed a cloud-based engineering platform that supports electronics engineers with rich component data from electronic manufacturers and adds automation to accelerate the design process. This leads to proven design time reductions of up to 90%. 

 
With the industry facing severe chip shortages, new components are being introduced and old components are becoming obsolete. CELUS makes the design of electronics accessible to many more engineers, facilitating direct information flows between electronic component manufacturers and their customers.

 
Munich-based CELUS was founded in 2018 by Tobias Pohl (CEO), Alexander Pohl (CTO) and André Alcalde (CPO). More than 1,800 engineers already use the CELUS Engineering Platform as of today, an increase of 3,000% compared with December 2021. CELUS will be using this investment to further prioritise rapid growth with a strong focus on the US market, strengthen its commercial team, and further enlarge its technology leadership.

CELUS CEO, Tobias, comments: “Engineers spend far too much time relying on their memories, or manually searching parts that might serve a certain function. CELUS changes the game, providing engineers with the digital tools to dramatically speed up this process and automate much of the hard work.

This fresh round of funding, and the support from top-tier investors and our prestigious active advisory board, allows us to grow our user base globally and open a CELUS office in the US – positioning us in the heart of the electronics industry. We want to reach every electronics designer out there, enabling them to focus more time on innovation and creativity, while our software reduces the tedious and time-consuming tasks they were dealing with before.”