AllSpice co-founder and CEO Valentina Ratner sat down with Supplyframe’s Majenta Strongheart on The BOM podcast. They covered AllSpice – what the solution is, how it came about, and hardware collaboration processes on the platform. 

Hardware video interview highlights

Can you give us a brief overview of AllSpice?

At a high level, AllSpice is a collaboration platform for electrical engineers, hardware engineers, and PCB designers. AllSpice uses git-based revision control through a central hub for collaboration – it features asynchronous design reviews, issue tracking, and releases, with analytics and automation. The solution is essentially Github, but made for engineering teams to develop electronics more efficiently – rather than text-based code, think PCB, schematics, and BOMs. 

Tell us a bit more about your background, and what drove you and your co-founder to create the hardware development platform

Valentina has a mechanical engineering background and worked at Amazon as a project manager, while Co-founder, and CTO Kyle Dumont has an electrical engineering background with experience working at iRobot. Together, the pair makes “one full stack developer.” They met while completing a dual-degree program at Harvard University. After being exposed to the software world and its native tools, increased project quality, deceased timelines, and high employee satisfaction rates, it was clear that hardware workflows needed a boost in efficiency. And the use of PDFs, excel sheets, large email threads, post-it notes, and screenshots was due for a tune-up. So, Kyle and Valentina pushed to build better processes for hardware engineers.

Why was Git the right choice for automating the workflows of hardware engineers?

Allspice uses Git protocol to power their platforms’ revision control. They chose Git due to several factors. The first one is that the hardware industry was already beginning to shift to Git from SVN. The second reason is Git puts various teams into a shared infrastructure, making it easier to collaborate with, for example, firmware or software teams. It encourages a common language and methodology between the teams, creating a seamless experience. The last reason behind choosing Git was the desire to provide native integration for ECAD tools.

Why do you think a hardware development tool like AllSpice did not already exist?

Previously, in product development, most of the limitations resided in the manufacturing side, taking significant time to get products back – this made tools that may have the ability to operate faster inessential. The innovation that is currently occurring enables a quicker process – teams are prioritizing doing more with less, driving efficiency in the PCB Design process.

Another reason why a similar platform has not existed before AllSpice is the lack of resources. Recently, the AllSpice team ran a survey asking hundreds of engineers what the biggest blocker is for them when adopting Git for hardware, and several respondents were simply unsure of where they could learn about it.

Watch the full interview here:

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