How hardware startups use us
Hardware startups are in a different hurry than established OEMs. A typical consumer electronics brand runs a 12-month design cycle; a hardware startup trying to hit a Kickstarter ship date runs a 4-month cycle with three fewer engineers. What they need from a manufacturing partner isn't just speed — it's speed plus manufacturing judgment, because the startup's founding team rarely has the experience to know which DFM rules matter and which are old-wives-tales.
Our typical hardware startup workflow is: weekly iteration cycles on CNC-machined prototypes (3–5 day turns, progressively closer to production intent), a vacuum-cast pre-production batch for Kickstarter backers or investor seeds (50–200 units), and a first production run in injection molding once volume and design are settled.
Investor demo samples and pre-seed hardware
At the earliest stages — before a seed round, before a proper industrial designer is hired — founders need a handful of physical demos to raise money. We produce these without looking down our nose at the low volumes. A set of 5 investor demo units in CNC aluminum, bead-blasted, anodized, and cleanly assembled runs $500–3,000 depending on complexity and turns in 1–2 weeks. See our rapid prototyping page for lead time options.
IoT device enclosures
IoT devices live in a specific manufacturing sweet spot: too low volume for injection molding to make sense at first (often 500–5,000 units across a product's first 12 months), but aesthetically more demanding than industrial IoT gear. The right process for most is vacuum casting — silicone tooling costs 5–10% of injection mold tooling, first parts land in 3 weeks, and the finish quality is indistinguishable from production injection molding on painted parts.
Our vacuum casting cells produce 15–25 parts per silicone mold. For a 200-unit production run, we typically pour 8–15 molds in parallel. Resin chemistry mimics ABS, PC, PMMA, PP, TPU, and flame-retardant grades. For over-molded soft-grip sections, we run two-shot processes on manual presses.
Robotics components
Robotics customers come to us for structural machined parts: frame rails, motor mounts, gearbox housings, joint brackets, end-effector plates. Aluminum 6061-T6 is the default material; 7075-T6 for weight-critical or load-bearing parts; titanium Grade 5 for the top-line wearable robotics and medical exoskeleton projects where the cost premium is acceptable.
For end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) that needs custom geometry matched to a specific workpiece, we run quick-turn 5-axis machining from customer STEP files. Typical turnaround 1 week; typical run size 1–10 units per deployment.
Drone chassis and camera gimbals
Drone work breaks into two types. Consumer quadcopters at high volume are made from injection-molded plastic and carbon-fiber composite — not our sweet spot. Industrial and inspection drones made in lower volumes (50–2,000 units per year) often use machined aluminum airframes and CNC-machined camera gimbals; that's where we fit.
For camera gimbals specifically, we hold tight tolerances on the bearing bores and pivot interfaces (±0.02 mm typical) to ensure smooth stabilization performance. Dynamic balancing is handled by customer's assembly, but we can provide pre-balanced static fixtures on request.
Kickstarter and backer-reward production
If you've launched a hardware Kickstarter, the manufacturing path typically goes: fulfill early backers (first 50–100 units) with CNC'd or vacuum-cast quality parts, move mid-tier backers (100–500 units) to vacuum casting, then move to injection molding for volumes above 500 and stretch-goal reward units.
The mistake we see most often is founders committing to injection molding on day one because it has the lowest per-unit cost at high volume — then realizing they need 6 months of tooling lead time and $40k upfront capital, and can't actually ship until 10 months post-campaign. The staged approach above gets early backers their rewards in 3–4 months and sets up a proven design for injection molding at month 8.