Allspice’s platform is Github, the Electrical Engineering Team

There’s no shortage of industry-specific documentation such as GitHub for software developers, as well as workflow collaboration tools like Slack and Google Docs. Now, the startup called AllSpice has been successful with the bet that electric hardware engineering teams also need their own collaboration platform.

The AllSpice platform lies between existing workflow software. This allows hardware teams to collaborate with the document types they traditionally work on (not easily translate Slack or email).

Engineers can single out and comment on the design aspects of these types of documents regarding allspice, just as software engineers can comment on a specific line of code via GitHub.

Kyle Dumont, co-founder and CTO of AllSpice, told TechCrunch that the startups are successful as they are not trying to build a new end-to-end collaboration platform, closing the gap between software solutions their hardware teams were already using.

“The team we were talking to already had tools that were really essential to our workflow,” Dumont said. “We had these electrical CAD tools, we had (product lifecycle management) tools, we had existing workflows that we knew the products we launched had to work.”

This learning came from the research the founding team did before launching the product and confirmed that they were building what the team actually used. In early testing, AllSpice not only focused on what users commented on both the good and bad, but also on what was never mentioned at all, co-founder and CEO Valentina Ratner told TechCrunch.

“Some of the most valuable things we learned were things people didn’t need or wanted,” Ratner said. “It really helped us with a range that would become an integral part of our workflow because we wanted to build a centralized platform that would become a home base for our electronics teams, rather than another point solution for our space.”

Both Ratner and Dumont had experienced problems attempting to solve Allspice directly while Allspice was working as an engineer for Amazon and Irobot, respectively. Ratner’s hardware designs had not been translated via email chains or PDFs, and by the end of Ratner’s era on Amazon, she had spent most of her time building an internal collaboration tool to solve this problem for Amazon.

The duo met in graduate school and launched the first version of Allspice’s product in 2022. It focused on small businesses and other startups. The company has started pivoting and started hoping to increase demand from companies, and has since landed customers such as Blue Origin, Bose and Sam Altman’s tools for humanity.

The startup has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Rethink Impact, with participation from L’Attitus Ventures, Gingerbread Capital and DNX Ventures, in addition to existing investors. The company will continue to provide its products with capital directed towards employment.

AllSpice launches a new AI agent tool that will help you validate your engineer’s designs and find mistakes.

“We saw a great demand for hardware and (and) AI tools to look into ways that can help teams become more effective and catch these design errors.

The company is intentionally launching this new AI agent in a closed beta for now with a focus on working with existing partners. The company wants to ensure complete accuracy before opening up the product further.

“The cost of a hardware error is much higher than that of a software error,” Ratner said. “Because of the widest differences between releasing software products and releasing hardware products, we have to make it in a way that makes sense to the industry.”