Colare Raises $2.5M Pre-Seed for Hardware Engineer Hiring Platform

San Francisco startup Colare launched its technical-assessment platform on 26 October, coinciding with the close of a $2.5M pre-seed funding round. Investors include Afore Capital, Garage Capital, and Acadian Ventures. The funding will go toward expanding the team and the roles the company can help clients hire for.

Colare cofounder Esther Thomas started the company in 2025. The platform maps the requirements of a role and recreates decisions future engineers could face on the job. It works like a specialised take-home test, built around the technologies a client is developing and the tools hires will need to master.

Colare places assessments near the start of the hiring process, so hiring managers speak only to qualified candidates. The platform also considers how candidates work, such as how they make tradeoffs when building new technologies.

"We're very fortunate to already be working with major space enterprises and major manufacturing enterprises," Thomas told Payload. "The goal is to really just become the first screen before any new candidate goes to a company."

Sourcepayloadspace.com