Building hardware is hard. It can be especially challenging in the early part of product creation, when designers need to set parameters and requirements, also known as the “definition phase.”
Can AI help speed up that process?
That’s what a group of longtime investors are betting on with a $3 million seed investment in Enzzo, a new Seattle startup that spun out of Pioneer Square Labs and aims to accelerate hardware development.
The 4-person startup is led by veteran entrepreneur and tech leader Ford Davidson, who most recently spent time at Meta and Amazon in product leadership roles. He previously started a phone backup service called Dashwire that was acquired by HTC in 2011, and launched an employee engagement startup called Coolr in 2014.
Davidson, the company’s CEO, said it can take weeks or months and multiple people across various skillsets to define hardware products and their requirements.
Using the power of the latest AI models and customer-uploaded data, Enzzo can quickly generate product definitions and goals; a set of user personas; detailed requirements; competitive insight; risks and mitigations; product use cases; and more. Enzzo can also produce documents and overview decks with relevant information.
“It’s a blend of human creativity and AI that results in a comprehensive set of requirements for a product far faster than is possible today,” Davidson told GeekWire.
The company, founded last year, already has paying customers. It generates revenue from a monthly subscription fee.
Hardware product makers across consumer electronics, industrial electronics, and medical devices industries are using Enzzo.
Enzzo is working with customers to integrate their data via APIs but has a vision for building out its own trained AI model in the future, Davidson said.
Davidson said the company is competing against the mishmash of tools used by hardware developers — such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office; project management software like Notion; and AI services such as ChatGPT.
“What differentiates Enzzo from these alternatives is we are focused on smart product development in one place with the added confidence your data won’t be used to train any models,” he said.
Seattle venture firm Unlock Venture Partners, a venture firm led by longtime Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Liu, led the seed round, which included participation from PSL Ventures, the venture arm of Pioneer Square Labs.
“It is a real game-changer for all hardware-related companies,” Liu said of Enzzo.
Enzzo is also the first startup to get funding from PSL’s new AI investing partnership with Silicon Valley firm Mayfield.
“Ford’s incredible background helping create new category devices and services at Microsoft, HTC, Amazon and, most recently, Meta make him the perfect leader to build Enzzo into a massive player in the hardware space,” said PSL Managing Director Geoff Entress, who helped build Dashwire with Davidson.
Davidson co-founded Enzzo with Zheng Liu, former head of engineering at payments startup Imprint.
Other employees include former Imprint engineer Ricardo Ma, and Patrick Fiori, a former design manager at Roku.
The company plans to double its headcount over the next four months.
