San Francisco-based Itera has emerged from stealth with a $12 million seed round and a prototype of what it claims is the world’s first fluid circuit board, a system that rewires physical electronics in under 60 seconds.
The company targets a $50 billion annual electronics development market where hardware engineers routinely wait two to six weeks between design iterations, a bottleneck that has not meaningfully changed in decades.
The PCB prototyping services market was valued at $6.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $13.4 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 7.8% and Itera is betting it can own the segment before incumbents catch up.
In 2013, Dr. AJ Cooper co-founded a smartwatch company called Olio Devices. It raised $10.2 million, built a beautiful piece of hardware, and shut down in 2016 after selling around 5,000 units. The reason it struggled was not the product, it was the pace. Every circuit change meant weeks of waiting. Cooper spent a decade after that thinking about the bottleneck he could not outrun. Itera is his answer.
Cooper, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia who has led hardware teams at Uber’s Jump e-bike division, Flex, and Lyft, co-founded Itera in San Francisco in 2024 alongside Alex Withrow, whose background spans cloud infrastructure and systems engineering at Bridgewater Associates, VMware, and Heptio. Together they cover the full stack – Cooper on the deep hardware science, Withrow on the software and infrastructure layer that makes it remotely operable. The team of eight also draws on backgrounds from Applied Materials, Intel, Google, AWS, and Lockheed Martin.
