San Francisco, CA: Colare, a technical screening platform for critical industries including aerospace, manufacturing and energy, has launched publicly with a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round to help companies validate engineering hires faster through simulation-based assessments.
The San Francisco-based company says Colare is designed to address a growing challenge for companies building rockets, satellites, defense systems and advanced manufacturing infrastructure, where engineering teams are opening roles faster than senior engineers can screen candidates.
According to Colare, hiring a single mechanical, electrical or embedded engineer can require roughly 40 hours of senior engineering time across phone screens, take-home reviews and multi-hour onsite interviews.
The company aims to reduce that burden by allowing hardware teams to evaluate candidates through realistic engineering simulations before scheduling interviews.
The $2.5 million pre-seed round includes Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures. Colare plans to use the funding to scale its simulation-based hiring platform, which is designed around real-world hardware engineering skills.
Why Hardware Hiring Is Breaking
The most reliable way to understand whether an engineer can perform a job is to watch them work. However, Colare notes that this has historically been difficult to do at scale in hardware engineering.
Aerospace, defense and manufacturing are among the largest employers of hardware engineers, and companies typically screen candidates through multiple technical rounds, including presentations, take-home exercises and onsite interviews.
The rounds that most directly test the work candidates would perform typically come later in the hiring process and require engineers to conduct them. As a result, candidates who could have been filtered earlier can consume significant engineering time.
The challenge is further compounded by workforce trends. Aerospace manufacturing already has a 15% attrition rate, more than double the rate of other sectors, while 29% of the aerospace and defense workforce is aged 55 or older.
This means the hiring burden is increasing at the same time that experienced professionals who can evaluate candidates are leaving the workforce.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects roughly 3,800 aerospace engineering openings annually through 2031 to keep pace with growth and retirements.
“Hardware companies are building some of the most technically ambitious products in the world, and they are still evaluating engineers with proxies for whether someone can actually do the job,” said Esther Thomas, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare.
“Ultimately for any ambitious product, success or failure comes down to the team. This is particular in hardware, where one wrong hire could mean a failed launch, a delayed mission or a lost contract.
Due to the high risk of doing it wrong, engineers have to stop building to interview. Our goal is to bring Colare to take the intuition that engineers use to screen their hires and turned 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 (Greenhouse, 2026 benchmark report).
For hardtech companies scaling quickly, that creates pressure on both sides: hiring demand is rising while confidence in the traditional screening process is falling.”
How Colare Works
Colare is a specialized technical assessment platform for screening hardware talent. The platform maps a company’s job description to engineering assessments across disciplines including CAD, PCB design, thermal analysis, FEA and systems problem-solving.
The simulations recreate the decisions engineers face during their work. Colare evaluates both the candidate’s process and final output, provides a detailed debrief and handles scheduling and industry-specific hiring workflows.
The company says this domain depth is important because hardware engineering rarely involves a single correct answer. Engineers routinely make trade-offs involving performance, cost, manufacturability, reliability and physical constraints.
Colare builds its assessments around these judgments, using rubrics informed by senior engineers who have shipped hardware.
The goal is to turn the intuition experienced engineers use to identify strong talent into a signal that can be scaled across hundreds of candidates.
Colare’s Traction
Colare is already working with companies ranging from newly funded startups to multi-billion-dollar aerospace manufacturers. Half of its clients currently operate in aerospace and defense.
Nain Abdi, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare, said: “We are working with some of the leading space, manufacturing, and hardware teams, we saw the lengths they were going to derive technical signals. Because hardware engineering is not about memorizing an equation – it’s how you take that knowledge and apply it to the constraints of building in the physical world.
Our assessments are grounded in first principles, real engineering work across critical industries and disciplines. Testing not just one, or three, but hundreds of candidates, on the same bar.”
For a two-person chemical manufacturing startup hiring its first electrical engineer, Colare became the technical evaluation layer the founders did not have in-house.
At a subsidiary of a public manufacturer, Colare flagged major engineering gaps in a candidate who had cleared the initial screening and was headed for the CEO round, identifying the issue before it reached senior leadership.
“I’ve run HR processes at a couple different startups, and I think there’s 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,” said John Slack, CEO of Rhoic.
“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.”
The Origin Story of Colare
Colare was founded by Nain Abdi and Esther Thomas after Abdi encountered the hiring challenge firsthand while working as an electrical engineer at Ford.
His team had stopped trusting résumés because candidates who appeared strong on paper often struggled during technical interviews.
The problem is growing as hardtech hiring accelerates. Aerospace and defense funding reached $35.6 billion in the first half of 2026, while one Colare space customer is adding up to 50 open roles a month.
What’s Next for Colare
Every assessment Colare runs captures something a résumé cannot: how an engineer actually thinks through real work.
The company’s long-term bet is that as this signal compounds, skill will replace pedigree as the credential companies hire on.
With its $2.5 million pre-seed funding, Colare is now focused on scaling its simulation-based technical screening platform across critical industries and helping companies evaluate hardware engineering talent through realistic work rather than traditional hiring proxies.
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