San Francisco startup Colare has launched with $2.5M in pre-seed funding from Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures. It tests hardware engineering candidates with simulations of real tasks, aiming to save senior engineers’ interview time. Half its clients are in aerospace and defence.
Colare, a San Francisco startup that tests job seekers on real engineering tasks, has launched with $2.5M in early funding, the company said on Monday. Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures put in the money.
Colare is aimed at firms that build rockets, satellites, defence systems and factories. Hiring one hardware engineer can eat up about 40 hours of senior staff time, the company says. That is because there has been no good way to test those skills early.
Its software turns a job ad into tests, such as designing a part or a circuit board. Candidates solve real problems in the tools they would use at work. Colare then scores both how they work and what they make.
Hardware firms “are still evaluating engineers with proxies for whether someone can actually do the job,” said Esther Thomas, Colare’s co-founder and co-CEO.
Demand for these engineers is growing. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects about 3,800 openings for aerospace engineers a year for the next ten years. Investors are backing hardware too, and Sequoia has committed $10B to AI and industries such as defence and manufacturing.
AI is also making CVs and interviews harder to trust. In a 2026 report by hiring software firm Greenhouse, 91% of US hiring managers said they had seen or suspected AI-generated interview answers.
Half of Colare’s clients work in space, aviation and defence, from new startups to big manufacturers, the company says. Thomas set it up with Nain Abdi, a student at Canada’s University of Waterloo who worked as an engineer at Ford.
About Colare
Colare is the first hiring platform built for hardtech. Colare has harnessed the intuition that engineers use to screen their hires and turned it into technical assessments that can be scaled across the entire candidate pool. It runs simulation-based engineering assessments that show how a candidate actually thinks, builds, and solves before anyone gets on a call.
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