ProvenMetal, a Y Combinator S26 company founded in 2026, is now taking orders for printed circuit board manufacturing done entirely within the United States. Printed circuit boards, or PCBs, are the flat green boards inside nearly every electronic device that hold the chips and other components in place and connect them with thin metal lines. The standard turnaround is seven business days, and there is no extra rush fee because that timeline is the company's default, not a special option. Sourcing parts, building the boards, assembling components, testing, and shipping all happen domestically (ProvenMetal).

The seven-day clock starts when a customer approves the quote and confirms the order. For board revisions, ProvenMetal works from the customer's last design, so follow-up builds come back faster than the first one (ProvenMetal).

Will Carkner and Johnny Doyle, two students from Trinity College Dublin, founded the company and started assembling circuit boards out of a garage in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. They used equipment aimed at serious hobbyists and small shops: a NeoDen YY1 pick-and-place machine (which automatically places tiny components onto boards), a Glenbrook X-ray for inspecting hidden solder joints, solder paste stencils, and manual rework stations (Y Combinator, Trinity College Dublin). Trinity College Dublin announced the founders' Y Combinator placement on 23 June 2026 (Trinity College Dublin). The founders initially announced ProvenMetal through a Hacker News Launch HN post (Hacker News).

ProvenMetal's target customers are drone and defense teams that need fully assembled boards returned within a week. Each build gets a single US-based team as the point of contact, so customers deal with one person across the entire process instead of coordinating across multiple vendors. Every order ships with a full quality record covering parts, process, and inspection data (ProvenMetal).

On the sourcing side, ProvenMetal buys every part from US suppliers and checks each component against the customer's bill of materials — the complete list of parts the board needs — before building begins. Components are stored at the company's San Francisco headquarters, then grouped and routed through its manufacturing network. ProvenMetal also offers long-term storage for hard-to-get parts, which is where the revision-speed advantage becomes concrete: if parts are already on the shelf from a prior build, the purchasing step for a follow-up order nearly disappears.

The company's software tools are built around reducing the front-of-house bottleneck. The founders concluded that the slowest parts of getting a circuit board made were not the assembly itself but the steps that come first: preparing a price quote, checking the design for manufacturability, and buying the parts (Hacker News).

To speed up that pipeline, ProvenMetal ships plugins for KiCAD and Altium (two popular circuit board design programs), hosted at github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-kicad and github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-altium. These plugins send the parts list directly into the ordering platform, so component purchasing can begin before the board layout is finished. When an order is placed, the platform automatically searches for parts across US and overseas distributors (Hacker News).

ProvenMetal keeps a profile for each manufacturer in its network and reformats incoming orders to match that manufacturer's specific requirements, cutting out multi-day email exchanges for clarification. A software tool called Fable 5 checks each board design for manufacturing problems against each factory's capabilities, catching issues before the design reaches the production line (Hacker News).

The broader context here matters. The US share of global PCB production fell from 30% in 2000 to roughly 4% today, while Chinese manufacturers now account for 55% of global output (Hacker News). ProvenMetal's domestic model, with sourcing restricted to US suppliers, runs directly against that decades-long trend of moving production overseas. Whether a startup that began in a garage can meaningfully shift that balance is an open question, but the structural approach is worth flagging: by automating the parts purchasing and design-checking steps rather than the assembly itself, ProvenMetal is attacking the part of the process that has historically eaten the most calendar time in small-batch, fast-turn PCB work.

The company describes itself as assembling the fastest circuit boards in the United States (Y Combinator). Ordering is now open; customers can send design files or specs to founders@provenmetal.com or call +1 (650) 229-4712 (ProvenMetal).

For engineering teams used to sending design files to Shenzhen, China, and waiting two to three weeks for assembled boards to clear customs, a domestic seven-day turnaround with full documentation is a genuinely different proposition. The quality record alone, covering where parts came from, how they were assembled, and inspection results, addresses a requirement that defense and aerospace teams have traditionally met through expensive vendor qualification programs. If ProvenMetal can hold the seven-day commitment at scale, the constraint shifts from manufacturing speed to whether US-based component suppliers can keep up with demand from teams that suddenly have a faster option.