Colare raises USD $2.5 million for hardware hiring tests

Colare has launched a technical screening platform for hardware employers and raised USD $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures.

The San Francisco company is targeting employers in aerospace, manufacturing, energy and related sectors that need to assess engineers before committing senior staff to lengthy interview processes. Its system is designed to test practical skills for roles including mechanical, electrical and embedded engineering through simulation-based assessments.

Hardware businesses often rely on several rounds of interviews, take-home exercises and on-site meetings to judge whether an engineer can do the work. Colare says that process can consume about 40 hours of senior engineering time for a single hire, because the most demanding technical checks usually happen late and require experienced engineers to run them.

Customers range from early-stage start-ups to large aerospace manufacturers, with about half of Colare's current client base in aerospace and defence. One customer in the space sector is adding as many as 50 open roles a month.

Hiring pressure

Several hardtech industries are facing a strained labour market. Colare cited attrition in aerospace manufacturing at 15%, while 29% of the aerospace and defence workforce is aged 55 or older. It also pointed to U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics projections for about 3,800 aerospace engineer openings a year through 2031.

The company argues that traditional hiring signals are becoming less reliable as candidates use AI tools to polish CVs and prepare interview answers. That has increased pressure on employers that need engineers with specialist knowledge but have limited time to verify whether applicants can perform in real working conditions.

Its platform maps a job description to an assessment across disciplines such as CAD, PCB design, thermal analysis, finite element analysis and systems problem-solving. Employers can review both how a candidate approaches a task and the final output, alongside a debrief and candidate ranking.

According to Colare, the assessments are built around the trade-offs engineers make between performance, cost, manufacturability, reliability and physical constraints. Senior engineers help shape the marking rubrics used in those exercises.

Esther Thomas, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer at Colare, said: "Hardware companies are building some of the most technically ambitious products in the world, and they are still evaluating engineers using proxies for whether someone can actually do the job. Ultimately, for any ambitious product, success or failure comes down to the team. This is particularly true in hardware, where one wrong hire could mean a failed launch, a delayed mission or a lost contract. Because the risk of getting it wrong is so high, engineers have to stop building to interview. Our goal with Colare is to take the intuition engineers use to screen hires and turn it into technical assessments that can be scaled across the entire candidate pool. AI is making traditional signals weaker. Résumés can be inflated, interview answers can be assisted, and polished profiles increasingly reveal less about how someone will perform in the job. For hardtech companies scaling quickly, that creates pressure on both sides: hiring demand is rising while confidence in the traditional screening process is falling."

Customer use

Colare gave examples from two customers. For a two-person chemical manufacturing start-up hiring its first electrical engineer, the platform provided a technical evaluation the founders could not conduct themselves. At a subsidiary of a public manufacturer, the system identified engineering gaps in a candidate who had already passed an initial screen and was due to meet the Chief Executive Officer.

Colare was founded by Nain Abdi and Esther Thomas. The idea grew out of Abdi's experience as an electrical engineer at Ford, where his team became wary of relying on CVs after some candidates who looked strong on paper struggled in technical interviews.

Abdi said the company is already working across several industrial fields. "We are working with some of the leading space, manufacturing and hardware teams, and we saw the lengths they were going to to derive technical signals. Hardware engineering is not about memorising an equation. It is about taking that knowledge and applying it to the constraints of building in the physical world. Our assessments are grounded in first principles and real engineering work across critical industries and disciplines, testing not just one or three candidates, but hundreds, against the same bar."

One customer, Rhoic, used the platform because its founders lacked the specialist knowledge to judge electrical engineering applicants. John Slack, Chief Executive Officer at Rhoic, said: "I've run HR processes at a couple different start-ups, and I think there are some core things that always go into it [...] but one of the challenges I've always had is actually doing a technical interview for someone, especially for us, given neither of us are electrical engineers. We don't know what good looks like in an answer. Instead of using senior engineers to discover basic capability late in the process, we can see much earlier how candidates approach the work they would actually be doing here."