Colare is the first technical screening platform for critical industries such as aerospace, manufacturing, energy, and more that helps validate hires faster. Working with multi-billion-dollar space companies and seed-stage startups to find their first hire, it has launched with a $2.5M round to scale the first hiring platform designed around real-world hardware skills.

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 by a $2.5 million pre-seed round of 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 on-sites. 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.

“Hardware companies are building some of the most technically ambitious products in the world, and they are still evaluating engineers with proxies for whether someone can actually do the job,” said Esther Thomas, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare. “Ultimately, for any ambitious product, success or failure comes down to the team. This is particularly true in hardware, where one wrong hire could mean a failed launch, a delayed mission, or a lost contract. Due to the high risk of doing it wrong, engineers have to stop building to interview. Our goal is to bring Colare to take the intuition that engineers use to screen their hires and turn it into technical assessments that can be scaled across the entire candidate pool. 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, assesses candidates, and handles scheduling and industry-specific hiring workflows.

That domain depth matters because hardware engineering rarely has one correct answer. Engineers constantly make trade-offs 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.

Nain Abdi, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Colare, added: “We are working with some of the leading space, manufacturing, and hardware teams; we saw the lengths they were going to derive technical signals. Because hardware engineering is not about memorizing an equation – it’s how you take that knowledge and apply it to the constraints of building in the physical world. Our assessments are grounded in first principles, real engineering work across critical industries and disciplines. Testing not just one, or three, but hundreds of candidates on the same bar.”

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.

“I’ve run HR processes at a couple different startups, and I think there’s some core things that always go into it […] but one of the challenges I’ve always had is actually doing a technical interview for someone – especially for us, given neither of us are electrical engineers. We don’t know what good looks like in an answer,” said John Slack, CEO of Rhoic. “Instead of using senior engineers to discover basic capability late in the process, we can see much earlier how candidates approach the work they would actually be doing here.”

Dr Thomas Otter, General Partner at Acadian Ventures, added: “Colare is solving a challenging problem. How do you give electrical, mechanical, structural, mechatronic engineers the opportunity to showcase their skills?  With the rapid growth of robotics technologies and the emergence of physical AI, the demand to fairly and robustly assess engineering skills is vast. We think the Colare team has what it takes to help companies evaluate and identify great engineers.”

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

Over time, Colare plans to turn assessment data into a broader picture of what engineers can do, including how they may perform on problems they have never been explicitly tested on. The long-term bet is that as companies get better at measuring ability directly, skill will replace pedigree as the hiring credential.

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