When Senra CEO Jordan Black was an engineer at SpaceX, he took on the job of scaling the company’s cables to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket.
Wiring is what it sounds like: the internal electrical wiring that runs through a rocket ship, car, plane or tractor, and it’s becoming increasingly important as these vehicles become smarter. They are custom assembled by technicians who are, functionally, experienced craftsmen.
“I traveled all over the world to visit cable companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It really hasn’t changed since the Cold War era of wooden tables [and] manual processes.”
Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan started Senra in 2023 to offer a more modern solution to vehicle manufacturers. Today, the startup is announcing a $65 million Series B round, led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, among others.
Senra doesn’t want to take humans out of the manual manufacturing process—at least not as long as robots find handling wires a challenge, and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, it is turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of traditional manual work.
The company is benefiting from increased money in US manufacturing, particularly in the defense industrial base. While Black could not disclose customers, he said they include manufacturers of “everything from underwater and marine vehicles, land defense vehicle systems, launch vehicles and satellites.”
If that doesn’t sound immediately significant, consider a recent cable disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that the wiring of its Starliner spacecraft was held together by flammable tape, causing a costly delay while the entire wiring system was redone.
Black points to this experience as a reason to raise standards for cable fitting, using automated systems to track material and mechanical changes. “Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can make a catastrophic change down the road,” he said.
Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wiring training program. The company is also, as it scales, finding ways to automate more of the process.
“It goes back to Elon’s principle that ‘automation is last,'” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on that now, but a lot of it was the standardization and the foundation that made SpaceX able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they’re doing hundreds a year.”
Senra — which, by the way, is spelled “harness” backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company is taking the “horsesh*t” out of harnesses — produces 1,000 each month at two different factories and plans to increase production to 10,000 a month in 2027.
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