Zenode launches AI search engine for an electronics industry tired of scrolling part catalogs
San Francisco - September 2, 2025 - New startup Zenode is offering its AI powered search engine for electronic components for free to all comers. Trained on millions of datasheets to 'speak' electrical engineering, Zenode helps electrical engineers find and use the best components in their circuit designs without spending countless hours manually reading datasheets for parts they will never use.
Compared to scrolling through the part catalogs that dominate today's industry, Zenode offers the following approach:
Natural Language Search across millions of components simultaneously
"Refine by AI" to display potential subgroups within results
An interactive datasheet to quickly evaluate specific components and highlight relevant source information from within the datasheet
"We're building Zenode to be the tool we wished we had while building our own hardware, while keeping in mind what AI can realistically achieve right now in terms of consistency and accuracy" said Founder and CEO Brandon Bourn. "LLMs are really, really good at making sense out of gigantic amounts of unstructured data, and component datasheets are one of the largest untapped data sources in the engineering world. The hardest part has been preventing hallucinations and increasing accuracy, both of which are critical in an industry where mistakes are all too frequently measured in millions of dollars and months of engineering work."
With $500 billion worth of components purchased annually, there is significant opportunity in this industry whose tools haven't evolved much since the catalogs were digitized and parametric filters were introduced in the 2000's. That's why Zenode has funding from many industry veterans, including Scott Harris (Founder of Solidworks/Onshape), Jon Stevenson (CTO of Stratasys), and Eric Friedman (Founder of Fitbit).
"AI tools aren’t smarter than humans, just a lot faster" said Collin Stoner, cofounder and CTO. "We're building tools that allow humans to leverage that speed, starting with reading fewer datasheets while still finding better components."
Zenode was founded in 2023 by Collin Stoner and Brandon Bourn. They are both Electrical Engineers that have taken 100s of design through manufacturing in their career, and see AI as one of the greatest opportunities for hardware design in their lifetime, and one that will supercharge engineers and lead to a new golden age of hardware development.
Source: Dnotitia