The IT Nerd

The companies building rockets, satellites, defense systems, and the factories behind them are opening engineering roles faster than their own engineers can screen for them. But, hiring a single mechanical, electrical, or embedded engineer takes roughly 40 hours of senior engineering time across phone screens, take-home reviews, and multi-hour onsite interviews, because there has been no reliable way to test hardware skills. Today Colare launched publicly to change that. The San Francisco company runs simulation-based technical assessments that let hardware teams watch candidates solve realistic engineering problems in the tools they would use on the job, before anyone books an interview.

The launch is accompanied with a $2.5 million pre-seed in funding to scale its simulation-based hiring platform, which lets companies watch candidates solve realistic engineering problems. The round includes Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures.

Why hardware hiring is breaking

The most reliable way to understand whether an engineer can do a job is to watch them work. In hardware, that has historically been almost impossible to do at scale.

Aerospace, defense, and manufacturing are among the largest employers of hardware engineers, and they screen candidates through multiple technical rounds: presentations, take-home exercises, and onsites. The rounds that actually test the job come last and can only be run by engineers, so every candidate who should have been filtered earlier drains scarce engineering time. Further compounding the issue, aerospace manufacturing already runs at a 15% attrition rate, more than double the rate of other sectors, and 29 percent of the aerospace and defense workforce is 55 or older, so the hiring load is rising just as the people qualified to judge candidates are leaving. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects roughly 3,800 aerospace engineer openings a year through 2031 just to keep pace with growth and retirements

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 hardware talent screening. Colare maps the role based on the company’s job description to engineering assessments across disciplines including CAD, PCB design, thermal analysis, FEA, systems problem solving, and more.

The simulations recreate the decisions engineers face on the job. Colare evaluates both process and final output, returns a detailed debrief, assessing candidates, and handles scheduling and industry-specific hiring workflows.

That domain depth matters because hardware engineering rarely has one correct answer. Engineers constantly make tradeoffs across performance, cost, manufacturability, reliability, and physical constraints.

Colare builds its assessments around those judgments, using rubrics informed by senior engineers who have shipped hardware. The goal is to turn the intuition an experienced engineer uses to recognize strong talent into a signal that can scale across hundreds of candidates.

Traction

Colare is already working with companies ranging from newly funded startups to multi-billion-dollar aerospace manufacturers, with half of its clients currently operating in aerospace and defense.

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 screen and was headed for the CEO round, catching the problem before it reached senior leadership.

The origin story

Colare was founded by Nain Abdi and Esther Thomas after Abdi encountered the problem firsthand as an electrical engineer at Ford. His team had stopped trusting résumés because candidates who looked strong on paper often struggled in 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

Every assessment Colare runs captures something a résumé never has: how an engineer actually thinks through real work. The long-term bet is that as that signal compounds, skill replaces pedigree as the credential companies hire on.