BootLoop AI Firmware Agent & HIL Testing

BootLoop is a San Francisco-based Y Combinator company founded in 2025 by engineers who previously built firmware for SpaceX's Raptor engine and an FDA-authorized emergency ventilator. It gives hardware and embedded teams AI agents that understand and interact with real hardware, because general AI coding assistants lack board context and cannot close the debug loop on a bench.

BootLoop Develop reads datasheets, schematics and Altium projects and builds a structured model of the board, including register maps, pin mappings, peripherals and nets; it then compiles, flashes and exercises firmware on the real board with test instruments and iterates against actual behaviour. BootLoop Test is a hardware-in-the-loop framework that provisions boards, schedules tests and orchestrates instruments of any make, with portable tests that run identically on any bench. Together they cover board bring-up, porting to new silicon, feature development, QA and end-of-line production testing.

• Board model: builds register maps, pin mappings, peripherals and nets from datasheets, schematics and Altium projects.
• On-hardware iteration: compiles, flashes and exercises firmware on the real board with instruments.
• Rapid bring-up: generates bring-up firmware for new boards from design documents.
• HIL test framework: provisions boards, schedules tests and orchestrates instruments of any make.
• End-of-line testing: runs the same portable tests on every production unit.
• Secure deployment: single-tenant, GovCloud (ITAR) or on-premises, with a public Trust Center.

An electronics manufacturer in Vietnam can use BootLoop Test to standardise end-of-line functional testing across production lines. An embedded engineering services firm can accelerate bring-up and porting of firmware to new microcontrollers for clients. An IoT device maker can run automated hardware-in-the-loop regression tests on each firmware change.

Engineering teams can generate bring-up firmware for a new board directly from its schematic and datasheets instead of writing it by hand. Every agent change is verified on real hardware and every result is stored and reproducible. The same portable tests can be reused from development through end-of-line production testing. Deployment options include single-tenant, GovCloud with ITAR compliance and on-premises, with zero code retention.

Firmware is becoming a larger share of product effort as edge AI, RISC-V and regulations such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act raise complexity, and AI agents that work on real benches are emerging to close the gap. Electronics manufacturers and embedded engineering firms in Vietnam, many serving export customers, face rising demand for faster bring-up and automated production testing.

BootLoop is based in San Francisco and was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch; co-founders are Noah Pacik-Nelson (CEO) and Chris Markus (CTO). It won Best in Show for Test and Measurement at Embedded World 2026 and launched BootLoop Test in June 2026.