Hi HN, we're Ahnaf and Seungmin from Simantic (https://simantic.com). We are building the simulation layer that lets engineers and AI agents test and validate firmware without hardware.Before Simantic, we were ex-firmware engineers at companies like Neuralink and Tesla. We’ve worked on some of the coolest projects, like the Cybertruck and Roadster, back when they were still early prototypes.We started working on firmware back when ChatGPT didn’t exist yet, but over the years, we saw how much of the engineering and development work has been automated as the frontier models improved to this point. In software, AI can run and test code inside your computer in a matter of seconds. But as firmware engineers, we didn’t have that luxury. An AI agent can write firmware in seconds, but in order to test it, we had to flash a physical board, then manually run tests using expensive and clunky tools with software made over a decade ago.To speed up the validation loop, we built the simulation layer that lets AI agents test the firmware and make decisions based on evidence, instead of waiting for the engineer to run tests for them. We used to spend hours testing our firmware manually on devboards, but now we use our own simulation to validate firmware in seconds.What we offer: - Virtual devboards you can program and run with a single API call, without leaving your terminal. - An AI code reviewer for firmware, that makes informed decisions based on evidence, using our simulation as a verification engine. - A CI/CD pipeline for your hardware projects that validates your firmware against a simulated version of the microcontroller on every commit.Here is a demo of our simulation used in an AI code review session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBK1ZjGWWbQOur users are using Simantic for bare-metal and RTOS development for applications like flight controllers, electric vehicles, robotics, and satellites. For safety critical systems like avionics and automotives, a robust simulation system is incredibly important, because every change in the firmware puts a human life at stake, especially for machines that cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.We recently helped an early stage space startup building satellites, to test their firmware on hardware that they don't yet have. Even the development modules for those satellites costs over $100k, and we helped them do that at just a hundredth of the cost and time.Early on in our journey, we established our idea to make better simulation but didn’t have a clear idea of how we would do it, we considered developing our software around open source emulation frameworks like Renode (https://github.com/renode/renode) and QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/), because they were tools a
Launch HN: Simantic (YC F26) – Firmware Simulation for AI Agents
Key takeaways
Simantic, founded by ex-firmware engineers, offers a simulation layer for AI agents to test firmware without hardware.
- Founded by ex-Neuralink and Tesla engineers, Simantic provides virtual devboards for firmware testing.
- AI agents can now test firmware in seconds using Simantic's simulation layer.
- The tool supports CI/CD pipelines and is used for safety-critical systems like avionics and robotics.
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