Colare Inc., a startup selling simulation-based technical screening software, said its platform is now generally available after closing a $2.5 million pre-seed round. Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures backed the round. The company pitches the product as a way for employers to test an engineering candidate's ability to do the job before that person reaches the interview stage.
Colare is aimed at aerospace, defense, energy and advanced manufacturing, industries where demand for specialized engineers outpaces hiring capacity, according to co-founder and co-CEO Esther Thomas. She said the bottleneck is that only existing engineers can screen applicants, which pulls senior staff away from engineering work for resume reviews and technical assessments. Companies run multiple technical rounds, including multi-hour onsites and presentations, and each one consumes engineering time, she said.
Thomas said the problem has grown harder as candidates use artificial intelligence tools to improve resumes and clear initial remote interviews. That lets unqualified applicants reach in-person panels, where they use up senior engineering hours, she said. She added that the cost compounds across high weekly interview volumes and low pass rates, and that a bad hire is worse.
Colare's assessments place candidates in simulated engineering environments built around real-world flight and manufacturing constraints. Employers upload a candidate list, send out the assessment and receive a performance brief for each applicant for HR teams and engineers. The company uses AI to map a role to hands-on assessments covering areas such as computer-aided design, printed circuit layouts, thermal analysis and finite element analysis, and scores decisions against rubrics built by senior engineers who have shipped real hardware.
Thomas said evaluating design work resists simple grading because problems have many valid solutions alongside subtly fatal ones, and the difference lies in tradeoffs machines cannot check, such as mass against stiffness or cost against reliability. She said Colare has been deployed by organizations ranging from startups to a multibillion-dollar aerospace manufacturer, chemical engineering firms and advanced manufacturing giants, with roughly half its customer base in aerospace and defense. One customer, a two-person chemical manufacturing startup developing field-induced reactor technology, used Colare to assess candidates directly because neither founder was equipped to evaluate an electrical engineer, she said.
In another case, Thomas said, the subsidiary of a publicly traded manufacturing firm was about to advance a candidate to a final interview with its CEO before the candidate failed Colare's simulated assessment. Colare will use the funding to expand its assessment library into more niche deep technology disciplines and to build more advanced AI models that can predict performance on unfamiliar complex challenges. Thomas said the company's mission is to make engineering hiring meritocratic by weighting verifiable skill over paper qualifications, arguing that resumes no longer indicate capability.
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