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?

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

• 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.
• If you know other engineering leaders seeking to improve their certification processes, connect us! 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!