Saphira is the easiest way for hardware products to get safety certified and reach market faster, such as industrial robots and heavy machinery.
Vanta for Hardware
Title: Saphira AI: Vanta for Hardware | Y Combinator

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### Vanta for Hardware

Saphira is the easiest way for hardware products to get safety certified and reach market faster, such as industrial robots and heavy machinery.



Saphira AI

Founded:2024

Team Size:2

Location:San Francisco

### Active Founders

### Akshay Chalana, Founder

Co-Founder, CEO - Saphira AI - Automating Safety+Systems Engineering: ex-Citadel (real-time trading workflow configuration), Apple (pb-scale dataset management for Siri and Vision Pro), Tesla (made sure batteries didn't explode in the heat of the sun), Meta (PyTorch/ONNX), Hyperloop (blew up and crashed pods)



### Oscar Avatare, Founder

Saphira AI (S24) Formerly at Amazon and Twitter. Passionate about helping the next generation of innovative hardware companies build better products faster. Per aspera ad astra.



### Company Launches

[### Saphira: Vanta for hardware](

**tl;dr: Hardware companies** use [Saphira]( to easily **generate safety reports** and **get certified to sell** their product.

We’re [Oscar]( and [Akshay]( and we’ve built software for hardware and compliance at Twitter, Tesla, Amazon, and Hyperloop.

We’re making it really easy to get **UL, CE, ISO, and TÜV** certifications like **ISO 10218** and **ISO 26262** for hardware products.



What are safety certifications, and who needs them?
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Building **industrial machinery** that can hurt someone, like robot arms and autonomous trucks?  Your **customers will mandate** TÜV safety certification per particular ISO and IEC standards!

Building **small appliances** that plug into the grid?  Many **retailers won’t sell your product,** and **commercial buildings won’t install** it unless you’re UL or CE certified!

Building a **satellite or communication system**?  The **FCC won’t allow** it to operate without certification!

Building **defense equipment** for the government?  **They won’t buy** it unless it’s compliant with the relevant MIL-STDs!

Why did we start Saphira?
-------------------------

Hardware products can’t get to market because teams **don’t know how to navigate the certification process**. Unlike SaaS, there are no tools like Vanta that tell you exactly what you need to test, change, and re-evaluate in your designs to pass audits. This sucks because every hardware company we talk to gets stuck in **rework cycles** with their consultants and auditors that they call **“horrendous and intimidating”** (real customer quote).

We've seen this at Amazon and Tesla, where engineers don't know when a change breaks certification. Each iteration requires them to work with consultants to understand what broke, lengthening the time to launch.

We created Saphira to empower these innovators to **rapidly** build complex products **that actually work**, all while achieving and maintaining compliance with the **evolving regulatory landscape**.

What does Saphira do?
---------------------

Saphira tells you exactly what you need to account for in your **design and testing** to **achieve and maintain** hardware safety certification and compliance. We’re a centralized data source for the **requirements, tests, and standards** that are relevant to your product, making it straightforward to **identify and triage safety and compliance risks** without wasting months of time and thousands of dollars on **slow safety consultants**.

Saphira automates **traceability**: regulatory reports by engineers that prove that requirements like “the robot arm won’t shock an attendant if touched while in motion” were implemented and validated. These reports are **painful and tedious** to produce. By maintaining references to all necessary source information, Saphira can automatically generate these reports, and even automatically identify which additional standard clauses are relevant to each requirement or design value.



Who is Saphira for?
-------------------

Saphira is for engineers at hardware organizations of any scale and size:

*   The **safety engineering team** at an industrial robotics company can use Saphira’s **compliance report generator** (i.e. ISO-12100 and ISO-10218) to **achieve certification** to operate in the US.
*   An **engineering leader** at a hardware startup that needs UL certs to sell to more customers can use Saphira to speed up their process by months by avoiding hiring a slow safety consultant.
*   A **systems engineer** at an aerospace/defense company can use Saphira’s **AI tooling** to understand **how various military and government standards** (such as MIL-STD-810 or ISO-26262) are relevant to each facet of their specs and models.

Ask
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*   We are experts in certifications for hardware companies.  If you think you might need this but aren't sure how to approach it, we are happy to help for free — [just reach out](mailto:akshay@saphira.ai).
*   If you know other engineering leaders seeking to improve their certification processes, [connect us](mailto:akshay@saphira.ai)! We are most interested in talking to leaders in industrial robotics, energy systems, autos, aeros, and defense.
*   If you worked at a larger hardware company before and saw any of these issues, we would love to talk just to learn from your experience
*   We would love product feedback: [book a demo](

### Other Company Launches

### Saphira AI - Orchestrating safe hardware engineering

Intelligent engineering design management for safety-critical products

[Read Launch ›](

### YC S24 Application Video
