Software development took a decade to democratize. Hardware has remained stubbornly out of reach. Atech is betting the same playbook works for the physical world.
Atech, an AI hardware startup building tools to make physical product development accessible to non-specialists, has raised a pre-seed round with participation from Nordic Makers, Emblem, Lovable, the Sequoia Scout Fund and the Andreessen Horowitz Scout Fund.
The company was founded by Tomas Erik Harmer, chief executive, Vladimir Baran, chief commercial officer, and David Stålmarck, chief technology officer. Its platform allows users to describe a hardware concept in natural language and receive a working prototype, with the underlying technical complexity — circuit design, component selection, firmware — handled by the platform rather than the user.
The pitch is a direct parallel to what tools like Lovable have done for software. Building a hardware prototype has traditionally required years of specialized expertise or significant investment in engineering talent, keeping countless ideas unrealized and concentrating hardware innovation among a small group of specialists. Atech is positioning itself as the first rung of a new abstraction layer for the physical world.
“Software has an entire stack of tools that lets a teenager build an app in a weekend — hardware doesn’t, and we’re still working at the first level of abstraction,” said Harmer. “Atech is building the missing layers, so creating in the physical world can feel as fast and joyful as writing code.”
Anton Osika, chief executive of Lovable and one of the round’s participants, said the early signals reminded him of his own company’s trajectory. “I am seeing the same patterns Lovable had, but for hardware,” he said. “The team is one of a kind.”
Also Read: Inside Google’s $175 Billion Bet on the Agentic Enterprise
The company frames its timing around the rise of what it calls Physical AI — intelligent systems that sense, interact with and act upon the real world — which is accelerating demand for hardware expertise across industries previously insulated from it. Atech’s argument is that as physical and digital systems converge, the ability to build hardware should become a general skill rather than a specialist one.
