The Simantic co-founder spent six years fixing firmware after the fact. Now he’s building the tool that tells engineers before they ever touch a soldering iron.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from watching a piece of hardware fail for the third time.

Seungmin Hong Wants Engineers to Stop Guessing Whether Their Hardware Works

You designed the board months ago. You waited for it to be manufactured, waited again for it to be assembled, and finally flashed the firmware onto it, hoping the last six weeks of work would simply turn on and behave. It doesn’t. So you go back, change something, and wait again.

Seungmin Hong has lived that loop enough times to want to end it. Before he was a founder, he was a firmware engineer moving between some of the more demanding hardware environments in the industry, including a stint on Tesla’s keys and authentication team and time spent on embedded systems at Simbe and Rapyuta Robotics in Tokyo. 

Each stop reinforced the same frustration: the tools used to validate hardware had not meaningfully changed in decades, even as the systems being built on top of them grew far more complex.

That frustration became Simantic, a Y Combinator-backed startup Hong co-founded with fellow Waterloo engineer Ahnaf Shahriar. 

The company is building simulation software that lets engineers test firmware against a virtual model of their processor and circuit board, rather than waiting on a physical prototype to exist first. In practice, that means catching a design flaw in an afternoon instead of a fiscal quarter.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Software has spent the last decade getting faster feedback loops. Code gets written, tested, and deployed in minutes, often automatically. Hardware never got that upgrade. 

A single iteration on a printed circuit board can still take weeks: design, manufacture, ship, assemble, flash, test, and only then find out what needs to change.

Hong has described this as one of the more expensive and least examined bottlenecks in the hardware industry, one that costs both money and, more quietly, the willingness of engineers to experiment. When every test costs weeks and real dollars, teams stop testing edge cases. They ship the version that mostly works.

Simantic’s pitch is that AI-assisted hardware design is only as good as the feedback loop underneath it. An AI system, or a human engineer for that matter, can propose a hundred design changes in an hour. It cannot validate any of them without a working test environment. 

That is the gap Simantic is building into: full-board simulation, from signal integrity down to firmware behavior, so both machines and humans can iterate at software speed on hardware problems.

From application to backing

Simantic’s early support came from Waterloo’s Velocity incubator and Builders Club before the company caught the attention of LeapYear, a fund built specifically around backing student and early-career founders before they have revenue or, in many cases, a finished product. 

LeapYear’s most recent cohort drew more than a thousand applicants for five spots, and Simantic was one of them.

From there, the company moved into Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch, a step that tends to compress a startup’s timeline in ways that are hard to plan for. 

Hong has been candid that the goal now is straightforward and unglamorous: hire the right early engineers, ship the product that’s been in development, and prove the simulation approach holds up against real hardware teams under real deadlines.

Why this matters beyond one startup

The bigger story here is not one founder or one company. It’s a pattern showing up across hardware, robotics, and embedded systems: AI can already write firmware and propose circuit designs at a level that would have taken a team of engineers a decade ago. 

What it still cannot do is verify any of that work without a physical device sitting on a bench. Simantic is one of a small number of companies trying to close that gap, and it’s a bet on a simple premise: the next unlock in hardware development isn’t a smarter chip, it’s a faster way to know if the chip works.

For Hong, that premise is personal. Six years of firmware work taught him exactly where the process breaks. Building Simantic is his attempt to fix it for everyone still stuck in that loop.

Learn more about Simantic at simantic.dev, or follow Seungmin Hong’s work directly on LinkedIn.

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