The Hardtech Podcast

Serhii Zatsarynin spent years at Siemens Healthineers running in-vitro diagnostics in Ukraine, in a world where every human touching the process counts as a potential error, and then came home to find the most important test in his life, the one he and his wife were running while trying for a baby, was a strip in a cup read by eye. That gap is where Ovul started.

In this in-person conversation with DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman, Serhii opens with a line that runs against the usual framing on this show, which is that hardware is not hard anymore. His case is that prototyping speed has changed what's possible, and he backs it with Ovul's own path, a working prototype in 30 days, pilot units with users about two months in, and roughly one iteration every two weeks after that. The product is a reusable digital saliva microscope that reads saliva ferning, a crystallization pattern tied to estrogen that was discovered in 1945 and has been sold for years as a manual device requiring a week or two of training to interpret. Serhii's move was to take the human out of that step with image recognition.

The conversation covers the parts of hardware that surprise first-time founders, including early units that broke every time a user opened them, why a device designed to have no interface ended up needing light indicators, the painful stretch between a few working prototypes and fifty consistent ones, the discovery that you cannot injection mold the shape you 3D printed, and why Ovul chose Wi-Fi over Bluetooth despite the cost, because a device left at home has to sync without the user thinking about it. Serhii also talks about raising capital with product already in market and finding investors unsettled rather than reassured by it.

The second half is about where users took the company, from ovulation detection into perimenopause and menopause transition, with around 360 serial production devices now in the field surfacing patterns the team didn't go looking for, and why Ovul deliberately collects no name, email, or phone number. He closes with a first distribution partner in Canada and the advice Grant calls the lesson of the episode, which is to go sell the thing even if it's ugly, because free feedback and paid feedback are not the same feedback.
Special Guest: Serhii Zatsarynin.

This one is the peanut butter and jelly of connected hardware, a software consultancy that builds for hardware startups sitting down with a hardware development firm. Peter Tuszynski, CTO at intent, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to talk about what AI has actually changed about bringing an IoT product to life, and what it has not.

Peter's answer is more grounded than most. He has seen individual engineers go from 1.5x to 7x on output, but he calls that unrealized capital gains, because shipping more code just means shipping more unverified code until the whole process gets the benefit of that speed. Grant's framing matches, that the real return on AI today is de-risking rather than velocity, since teams using it well are looking under rocks they would never have turned over, and every time you speed up one stage the bottleneck reappears further down the line.

At intent the bottleneck turned out to be manual QA, because their projects involve a phone, a peripheral, and a cloud backend, and the messiest failures live between the phone and the peripheral where Bluetooth is low bandwidth and the device landscape is a mess. So they built a QA agent that is agnostic of the underlying model, wired up to drive iOS or Android, a tethered peripheral over CLI, and a test case repository, and found that newer models can read a human readable test case and work through it the way a QA engineer would.

The conversation also covers why embedded was supposed to be out of reach for AI and what actually changed, which came down to giving a model a board to flash and a way to verify what it flashed, and from there to giving models control of lab equipment and closing the loop between the physical world and what a model can touch. Peter traces the progression from prompt engineering to context engineering to harness engineering to loop engineering, and the two of them get into designing hardware to be testable in the first place, the carpenter and the CNC machine as the analogy for engineers worried about their craft, why prompting has started to look more like talking than writing, and why play, not work, is how anyone actually figures out what these tools are good for. Filip Pietraszkiewicz closes with advice for founders on getting something clickable in front of users as early as possible.
Special Guests: Filip Pietraszkiewicz and Peter Tuszynski.

Epitel just closed a $26 million Series B to expand remote wireless EEG monitoring, and Mark Lehmkuhle, the company's CTO and founder, and J Carroll, its Director of Software Engineering and Architecture, join DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to talk through how the technology got out of the lab and into the world.

Mark describes Epitel as a machine learning company for detecting neurological disorders that happens to build its own wireless wearable EEG sensor, a small chicklet-sized device with two gold electrodes that sticks to the scalp with a single piece of adhesive and conductive hydrogel. The hardware, in his framing, is the means to an end, because the product is really about converting a huge stream of data into clinically actionable information. The origin traces back to a decades-old NIH anti-seizure screening program at the University of Utah, where capturing rare seizure events in rodent models meant recording EEG around the clock for nearly the lifetime of the animal. Nothing existed to do that, so they built it, using a concept borrowed from the wireless tire pressure monitor in a car, with thumbnail-sized transmitters that could record continuously for six months.

The conversation gets into the electrode research behind the current product, including recreating a study from the early 1970s to determine the minimum number of electrodes needed to still see the electrographic signature of a seizure, which came down to four locations, and a second study on how close together those electrodes can sit. Mark also explains why any of this matters commercially, since self-reporting remains the primary outcome measure in many trials and is roughly fifty-fifty at best.

The rest is about the part Mark says is genuinely hard, which is human factors rather than the tech stack. Their users run from neonates to people in their 90s, seizure forecasting raises the question of what a percentage chance means to any individual, and a sensor nobody wears produces no data at all. J talks about garbage in and garbage out, why knowing a recording is bad beats not knowing, and why usability is a first class citizen on his engineering team. Grant and DeAndre add the lily pad analogy for small companies that cannot cross the pond in one jump, why Epitel's first FDA clearance was a milestone rather than a sellable product, why connected devices are never finished as long as they are supported, and why a little ignorance may be the only thing that gets a first-time founder to launch at all.
Special Guests: Justin ("J") Carroll and Mark Lehmkuhle.

Roxie Alsruhe had never done anything in hardware or manufacturing when she came home from the hospital with her first born and ran straight into a problem that a lot of families quietly deal with, which is knowing when a bottle of breast milk expires without having to decode a CDC chart while you are exhausted. That problem became HoopDee, a set of NFC-enabled silicone rings that stretch onto any bottle and sync to an app with a tap, so everyone in the house can see what is in each bottle, where it has been sitting, and when it expires.

In this episode Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick talk with Roxie about a founder journey that ran backwards from the usual hardware story. She started with an ugly PowerPoint instead of a prototype and shared it with friends until she knew the problem was real, then tested the tap-to-sync experience with stretchy bottle bands and NFC tags bought off Amazon, and released the app months before the hardware existed so she could iron out workflows and collect feedback while manufacturing caught up. They get into the reality of hardware once it arrived, including longer timelines and higher tooling costs, simplifying the design down to a single over-molded piece of silicone with a laser-etched secondary process, and the test rig her dad built to stretch samples a thousand times to find the right formula.

The back half is go to market, which Roxie is candid about being the hardest part, because her core audience is first-time parents who have not experienced the problem yet. She talks about why the conversion rate at in-person expos is so much higher than anything online, how grandmothers and sisters at her booth end up selling the product better than she can, and why TikTok Shop and affiliates are the closest digital version of that moment. She closes with advice for new hardware founders, which is that everything takes longer, keep reserves, and keep asking for feedback even when it stings.
Special Guest: Roxie Alsruhe.

A vision system can see a car enter a work zone in milliseconds. Getting that warning to a worker standing two miles down the highway, wearing a helmet and running a jackhammer, is a completely different problem.

Derek Bleyle, VP of Product at ClearObject, and Tim Hagan, Principal Data Scientist at ClearObject, join host Grant Chapman and guest host Elijah Clarke, hardware engineer at Glassboard, to tell the story of Clear Work Zone, from a design thinking workshop with the New York State Thruway Authority to a production system protecting crews today.

ClearObject spent eight years building software for connected products before this, and the episode is an unusually honest look at what that team had to learn. They started with commercial off the shelf everything, discovered that phones and smartwatches could not deliver the range, battery life, or control they needed, and ran a six week proof of concept that ended with one of their developers soldering a wearable together in a hotel room the night before the demo. That demo was enough to earn buy in from the customer and from their own leadership, which is the real lesson for anyone trying to get a hardware idea moving.

From there the conversation gets into the engineering. Why they alert when a vehicle actually enters the zone rather than trying to predict it, because alert fatigue kills a safety product on day one. Why Wi-Fi HaLow was the only wireless option that could cover a two and a half mile closure with low latency when Bluetooth is too short and cell service does not exist. How they budgeted two and a half seconds from event to a worker getting clear, and drove the end to end system down to four tenths of a second. What it takes to build a device that survives sunlight, dust, rain, vibration, and being thrown in the back of a truck with a helmet on top of it.

Derek and Tim also talk about the shift in mindset that happens when a product moves from convenience to safety critical, the difference between the buyers who run safety organizations and the workers actually wearing the device, and the value of building in the hundreds instead of the thousands so real users can live with a product long enough to tell you what is actually wrong with it.

If you are building a connected hardware product, this is a clear look at the path from idea to something people trust with their lives, and a reminder that the last 20% of the functionality is where 90% of the effort lives.
Special Guest: Derek Bleyle.