For the last five years we've been quietly running and scaling something we haven't really talked about in public. Today we're showing it to the world. This is The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.
The problem
Over the past 30 years, most electronics manufacturing left the West. Assembly was labor-intensive, and labor is expensive in high-wage countries, so it moved to where labor was cheap. We designed in the US and built in China, and for a long time that worked.
Automation is starting to change that, but mostly at huge volumes. SpaceX now builds Starlink dishes by the million in Bastrop, Texas. When you make the same product over and over, it's worth building a line around it.
Most products don't reach Starlink volumes. The typical hardware company needs ten of this, a hundred of that, and a new revision next week. That kind of high-mix work has stubbornly resisted automation, because every new design means hours of setup and manual changeovers. So it either went overseas or to expensive quick-turn shops.
What The Grid is
The Grid takes a different approach. Instead of a fixed line that has to be reconfigured for each product, it is one large robot. Levitating movers carry each board and its parts between machines that print solder paste, place parts, reflow, solder and inspect. Learned models, AI agents and classic optimizers schedule all of it.
Every board takes its own route through the factory. There are no changeovers and no per-design setup, so one unit of 100 different designs runs as easily as 100 units of one. Prototypes and production batches run on the same machines.
It's not only startups who need this. Even the biggest companies have huge numbers of low-volume boards: test stations, tooling, R&D and production batches. A leading EV maker, a top AI lab and household-name tech companies already build on The Grid.
What it means for a real board
To make this concrete, we priced one of our example boards on The Grid and at a typical quick-turn shop in Shenzhen: a 4-layer motor controller with 118 parts per board (38 unique), five assembled boards, parts included, delivered to a US address.
Built on The Grid, the boards are at your door in 4 days for $630. Ordered from a typical quick-turn shop in Shenzhen, they cost about $465 once shipping and US tariffs are added, and take 9 days at the median.
So you pay about $165 more than the Shenzhen shop and get your boards five days sooner, with no customs and a supply chain you can count on. For most hardware teams, five days of engineering time is worth a lot more than $165.
It's not a prototype
The Grid has been running for customers for five years. It already builds tens of millions of dollars of electronics a year. Across CircuitHub we've shipped more than 2.2 million boards, placed more than 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers.
What's next
Demand is already well ahead of what we can build. This year we will 5x capacity, with another big jump coming in 2027.
The longer-term goal hasn't changed since we started: make building hardware as fast as designing it. Electronics manufacturing left the West because it couldn't be automated at the volumes most companies need. The Grid shows it can.
If you want to help rebuild the Western electronics supply chain, we're hiring. And if you have a board to build, get an instant quote.