Bench wants to create a Cursor for hardware
Tags: AI for Engineers, Hardware Automation, Polish Startups, Deeptech, CAD, Robotics, SpaceTech, Bench, Venture Capital, Engineering Productivity
A new wave of deeptech is rising from Poland’s engineering elite, and its name is Bench. The startup, co-founded by Martin Bielicki, a mechanical engineer who previously built London’s first Hyperloop pod, has just secured nearly PLN 5 million (~€1.15M) in pre-seed funding to bring artificial intelligence to one of the last digital frontiers: hardware design. The goal? Build an AI platform that accelerates hardware development tenfold — and finally pulls design engineers out of tedious workflows stuck in the 1990s.
“Hardware is the new frontier for AI. But designing it is still done manually — like software before GitHub Copilot,” says Bielicki, who co-founded Bench with Raihaan Usman, a former leader of the Karman Space Program, where teams built reusable rockets.
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From Rocket Labs to a Virtual Assistant for Engineers
The co-founders of Bench aren’t newcomers to high-impact innovation. They’ve worked in labs where the stakes were orbital: rockets, space-grade components, hyperloop capsules. And what united these efforts wasn’t just ambition — it was friction. Designing hardware, they found, was slow and frustrating. Teams spent more time updating documentation and formatting CAD files than solving technical challenges. That inefficiency inspired Bench, a platform they call the “Cursor for Hardware Design” — a nod to GitHub’s AI developer tool “Copilot.”
Bench’s core innovation is a process automation layer for engineers. Instead of forcing teams to abandon existing tools, Bench integrates directly with CAD, CAE, and PLM platforms — and allows engineers to offload repetitive tasks to an AI agent that works behind the scenes. Tasks like: regenerating models after minor edits, synchronizing design changes across documents, translating manufacturing specs, generating design reports.
“Engineers are hired to innovate, not to click,” says Bielicki. “Bench handles the clicks.”
PLN 5M Pre-Seed Backed by Global Deeptech Funds
Bench’s vision has drawn attention from a powerful lineup of early-stage investors:
SuperSeed (UK-based B2B AI fund) led the round
Vanagon Ventures
ellipsis.vc
Buildery.vc
Revenue Syndicate
A group of angel investors with deep ties to aerospace and SaaS
Notably, the company was accepted into EWOR, a selective European accelerator with a <0.1% acceptance rate. According to insiders, Bench was one of the few engineering-first companies in the latest cohort — an endorsement of its blend of technical depth and commercial viability.
The startup is based in London, but its technical heart remains in Poland. The team has engineering talent from Warsaw, Gdańsk, and Kraków — with plans to scale its R&D team across Europe.
Why Hardware Needs Its Own AI Stack
While AI has transformed software engineering, legal research, and marketing, hardware development remains deeply analog. Even today, engineers copy and paste specs between CAD tools, manually update Excel BOMs, and track design decisions via email threads.
This bottleneck is more than a UX flaw — it limits how fast we can respond to planetary-scale problems like energy transition, robotics, or climate tech. Bench argues that freeing engineers from grunt work could accelerate breakthroughs across every industrial sector, from satellites to green hydrogen reactors.
The company believes that AI-native hardware teams — those who design with automation from Day 1 — will outperform legacy players by orders of magnitude. Bench wants to make that possible with almost no switching cost.
What’s Next: Hiring, Product Development, and Expansion
Bench will use the new funding to:
Expand its engineering and product team, with a focus on AI systems and mechanical design tools
Continue development of its alpha platform, which is already being piloted with stealth partners in the robotics and aerospace sectors
Build out its community of early adopters, offering premium salaries and significant equity to top engineers willing to “code the future of physical design”
“We’re not another SaaS tool. We’re building infrastructure for the next industrial revolution,” says Usman.
Bench is currently hiring across AI research, mechanical engineering, UI/UX, and enterprise sales. Early employees are offered founder-level equity — part of the company’s mission to attract mission-driven engineers who want to “automate away the boring parts of hardware.”
The Future: A Faster Path to Machines that Matter
Bench isn’t alone in its vision. Venture capital is increasingly looking at hardware automation, particularly where AI can reduce the design-to-production cycle from years to weeks. Competitors like Duro, Synera, or Instrumental.ai are exploring adjacent territory. But Bench’s edge is its founder experience in full-stack R&D, where real-world latency is measured in engine tests, not slide decks. If it succeeds, Bench could unlock an entire category of engineering creativity that’s currently buried under version control nightmares and regulatory paperwork.
As Bielicki puts it: “We built rockets. This time, we’re building something even more powerful — freedom for engineers.”
