Colare raises $2.5M pre-seed to vet engineering candidates with simulations

Colare co-founder and co-CEO Esther Thomas told SiliconANGLE that the startup is targeting aerospace, defense, energy and advanced manufacturing, where companies are seeking specialized engineers but hiring processes are slow. She said the only way to assess candidates in most cases is to have an expert engineer already employed by the company screen them, pulling that employee away from engineering work to review resumes and conduct physical assessments.

Thomas said hiring runs through multiple technical rounds, including multihour onsite interviews and presentations, and only engineers can conduct them. Each round consumes engineering time, often senior engineering time, which she described as one of the scarcest and most expensive resources at these companies.

She said candidates increasingly use artificial intelligence tools to polish resumes and get past initial remote interviews, allowing unqualified candidates to reach in-person panels. Every unqualified candidate who reaches an engineering panel burns senior engineering hours, Thomas said, and high weekly interview volume, low pass rates and the cost of engineering talent compound into a large annual dollar cost. A bad hire is worse, she said.

Colare says its simulation-based engineering assessments show how a candidate thinks, builds and solves problems before an interview. Thomas said the process is difficult because each problem can have infinite solutions; a structural bracket, power board or propulsion feed system can have thousands of valid designs and thousands of subtly fatal ones. The difference lies in tradeoffs that machines cannot check, such as mass against stiffness, thermal margin against packaging, manufacturability against performance, and cost against reliability, she said. There is no simple answer key.

The company places candidates inside real engineering environments and gives them tasks drawn from real-world flight and manufacturing constraints, Thomas said. Hirers upload a candidate list and can send the assessment to the entire candidate pool, and Colare's model analyzes each candidate and outputs a detailed brief on performance for HR teams and engineers, she said.

Colare uses AI to map a role to hands-on, AI-generated assessments in areas including computer-aided design, printed circuit layouts, thermal analysis and finite element analysis. Candidate decisions are scored against rubrics built by senior engineers who have shipped real hardware, Thomas said. She said every discipline demands its own domain depth, and a guidance, navigation and control problem is nothing like a design-for-manufacturing problem.

Thomas said Colare has been deployed by organizations ranging from startups to a multibillion-dollar aerospace manufacturer, chemical engineering firms and advanced manufacturing giants. About half of its customer base is in aerospace and defense, she said. One customer, a chemical manufacturing startup developing field-induced reactor technology, began with two staff members and needed to hire its first electrical engineer quickly while keeping the business running, Thomas said; it could not spare time to screen dozens of candidates.