tl;dr: We capture requirements and design in a central platform so that safety for complex physical products can be continuously evaluated: a simple and easy-to-use alternative to Jama or IBM DOORS.

We’re Oscar and Akshay, and we’ve built hardware controls and virtualization for Tesla, Amazon, and Hyperloop. We’ve blown up prototypes and fried lasers by not applying effective system design and are building tools to make it easier to prevent such failures.

Why did we start Saphira?

While building Hyperloop pods, we struggled with unusual and novel constraints: we had to take the propulsion, braking, and electronics of a sophisticated train and make them work perfectly in a vacuum chamber. Basic things that work in the normal world just didn’t there: network activity was severely throttled so remote control and telemetry were difficult, and electronics would arc more easily, requiring additional protections. This mandated that we put together clear product requirements that we needed to integrate and validate across the entire implementation stack, which turned out to be so hard that we struggled to get our pods working in time and faced weeks of all-nighters just to fail review and be barred from the race!

Since then, we’ve been searching for how large organizations we’ve been part of, like Tesla and Amazon, have made this easier: in truth, they haven’t! The most mature, most established industries, such as aerospace, account for this with process: intensive modeling, documentation, and data entry that innovators don’t have time for. When regulation and certification standards are put in place, products are taken off the market or endure years-long delays.

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 is a single source of truth where requirements, architecture, and tests can all be entered, parsed from existing documents, and tied together so that safety risks are identified and triaged quickly.

Saphira is the easiest way to demonstrate traceability: regulatory reports by engineers that prove that requirements like “the Hyperloop pod must not catch fire in a vacuum chamber” were implemented and validated. These reports are painful and tedious to produce: by maintaining references to all the source information for them, Saphira can automatically generate them! Most importantly, Saphira removes systems engineers as a bottleneck to updating foundational engineering data, enabling any engineer to model and report on safety and compliance, making traceability easy for any fast-moving team.

Ultimately, we see traceability as not just a regulatory requirement but an enabler for automated engineering: as engineers define the relationships we use to sync data between, say, their codebase and task management system, this can be used to automatically propagate changes across an entire system! For example, one could change the requirement for a motor to produce 200 Nm of torque to 300 Nm: since they had linked this through a formula in Saphira to the current draw requirement from the battery, we would automatically update that in the power distribution PCB schematics, short-circuiting hours of work per change!

Who is Saphira for?

Saphira is for engineers at innovative companies designing and building safety-critical hardware and software systems at organizations of any size:

• The safety engineering team at an industrial robotics company can use Saphira’s compliance report generator (i.e. ISO-12001 and ISO-10218) to achieve certification to operate in the US a year faster than it otherwise would be able to.
• A systems engineer at an AV startup can use Saphira’s test management framework to perform release safety reviews 50% faster and double their pace of software iteration.
• The head of hardware responsible for writing product requirements at an energy startup that makes residential batteries can use Saphira’s AI tooling to parse design documents and generate supplier specifications in half the time to get faster quotes from prospective manufacturers and ship to customers sooner.

Ask

• If you are seeking an engineering/application lifecycle management, requirements management, or systems engineering tool for your hardware company, let’s talk!
• If you know other engineering leaders seeking to improve their 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!