ProvenMetal, a Y Combinator S26 company founded in 2026, is now taking orders for fully domestic printed circuit board manufacturing. The standard turnaround is seven business days, and there is no expedite fee because that timeline is the company's default offering, not a rush option. The entire process — sourcing parts, fabricating the boards, assembling components, testing, and shipping — runs within the United States (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 initial one (ProvenMetal).

Will Carkner and Johnny Doyle, two students from Trinity College Dublin, founded the company and began assembling circuit boards out of a garage in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. They used prosumer-grade equipment: a NeoDen YY1 pick-and-place machine (which places components onto boards automatically), a Glenbrook X-ray for inspecting 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 point of contact, so customers deal with one owner across the entire pipeline 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 verifies each component against the customer's bill of materials (BOM) — the list of all parts needed for the board — before fabrication begins. Components are stored at the company's San Francisco headquarters, then kitted and routed through its manufacturing network. ProvenMetal also offers long-term storage for long-lead-time items, which is where the revision-speed advantage becomes concrete: if parts are already in inventory from a prior build, the procurement phase of a subsequent order collapses to near zero.

The company's toolchain integration is built around reducing the front-of-house bottleneck. The founders concluded that quoting, DFM review, and part procurement were the real constraints on turnaround time, not assembly itself. DFM, or design for manufacturing, is the practice of checking that a board design can actually be built reliably by a given factory (Hacker News).

To compress that pipeline, ProvenMetal ships KiCAD and Altium plugins (hosted at github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-kicad and github.com/proven-metal/provenmetal-altium) that push a design's BOM directly into the ordering platform, enabling component procurement before the layout is finalized. When an order is placed, the platform automatically sources the BOM across US and overseas distributors (Hacker News).

ProvenMetal maintains a profile for each manufacturer in its network and formats incoming orders to match that manufacturer's specific requirements, eliminating multi-day email round trips for clarification. A software tool called Fable 5 checks board designs for DFM issues against each manufacturer's capability sheets, catching problems before the design reaches the factory (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, sits directly against that decades-long offshoring trend. Whether a garage-origin startup can meaningfully shift that balance is an open question, but the structural approach is worth flagging: by automating BOM procurement and DFM validation rather than focusing on the assembly step itself, ProvenMetal is attacking the part of the process that has historically absorbed the most calendar time in low-volume, 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 that have grown accustomed to sending Gerber files (the standard file format describing a PCB layout) to Shenzhen and waiting two to three weeks for assembled boards to clear customs, a domestic seven-day standard turnaround with full traceability documentation is a genuinely different proposition. The quality record alone, covering parts provenance, process data, and inspection results, addresses a procurement requirement that defense and aerospace teams have traditionally satisfied through expensive vendor qualification programs. If ProvenMetal can hold the seven-day commitment at scale, the constraint shifts from manufacturing throughput to whether US-based component supply can keep pace with demand from teams that suddenly have a faster option.