- Amsterdam-based Schematik, founded by Samuel Beek, raised $4.6 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners to develop an AI-guided hardware design tool built on Anthropic’s Claude.
- Anthropic engineer Felix Rieseberg announced a new Bluetooth API allowing hardware devices to interact with Claude directly, posting a GitHub reference design resembling a device built by an early Schematik user.
- Schematik currently limits output to low-voltage (3–5V) architectures as a deliberate safety constraint against electrical hazards.
- Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, described the component compatibility challenge Schematik targets as “a super hard problem” well-suited to AI-scale pattern matching.
What Happened
Schematik, an Amsterdam-based startup founded by Samuel Beek, has raised $4.6 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners to commercialize an AI-guided hardware design tool built on top of Anthropic’s Claude. The tool, which Beek has described repeatedly as “Cursor for Hardware,” lets users describe a physical device in plain language and receive a bill of materials, purchase links for components, and step-by-step assembly guidance. The fundraise was reported by Wired.
Separately, Anthropic engineer Felix Rieseberg posted on X announcing that Anthropic has enabled “a little Bluetooth API for makers and developers, allowing you to build hardware devices that interact with Claude,” along with a GitHub link for a reference device. Anthropic did not respond to Wired’s request for comment on whether the design was directly inspired by work from Schematik’s user community.
Why It Matters
Schematik’s launch arrives as major AI companies—including OpenAI and several chipmakers—have moved to develop or support consumer hardware. The harder problem Schematik targets is not voice or AI integration but the upstream challenge: translating a non-engineer’s intent into a correct, purchasable, compatible parts list.
Beek’s own origin story illustrates the gap. Before building Schematik, he used ChatGPT to wire an electric door opener; the model failed to distinguish between wet and dry electrical connections, and the resulting device blew every fuse in his house. That incident, he says, led him to Claude and then to the product itself.
Technical Details
Schematik currently constrains its output to low-voltage architectures—three or five volts at most—as a deliberate safety boundary. That voltage range is sufficient for Internet of Things devices and consumer gadgets such as music players but excludes higher-power applications. Beek has stated the long-term goal is to extend the tool’s scope to humanoid robotics, though no timeline has been disclosed.
Anthropic’s Bluetooth API, announced by Rieseberg, is aimed at makers and developers and appears designed to let physical microcontroller-class devices make calls to Claude over a short-range wireless link. The reference design Rieseberg shared on GitHub closely resembles “Clawy,” a Tamagotchi-style device built by Marc Vermeeren, who leads branding at the European AI company N8N and is also a Schematik investor. Vermeeren built Clawy to help him manage Claude coding sessions; other users have since produced their own variations.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of hardware teardown firm iFixit, noted the core technical problem Schematik addresses: “Electronics design can be very complex, often requiring sorting through many different SKUs and ensuring compatibility of all the pieces. That is just a super hard problem. This kind of scale is the sort of thing that AIs are good at.”
Who’s Affected
The immediate user base is the maker and hobbyist community—developers and tinkerers who have coding fluency but lack formal electrical engineering training. Beek told Wired the tool is intended to lower the barrier to hardware prototyping: “The big problem in hardware is that it’s very gatekept and that very few people can do it.”
Anthropic’s Bluetooth API could also affect professional embedded-systems developers looking to integrate conversational AI into low-power devices without building a custom pipeline. The combination of Schematik for design and a native Claude Bluetooth interface creates a potential end-to-end workflow from concept to connected device.
What’s Next
Schematik is currently available for public use in its early form. Beek has said he intends to pursue investor funding and commercialize the tool, and the Lightspeed round represents the first disclosed institutional capital. No product pricing or availability timeline was announced alongside the raise.
Anthropic’s Bluetooth API is live as of Rieseberg’s announcement, though no official documentation page was linked in Wired’s reporting. Beek acknowledged that “vibe coding hardware” carries risk analogous to vibe coding in software—but argued electronics has an inherent verification advantage: “The nice thing about electronics is that it’s pure physics, so you can actually check.”
