SQUARE ONE FOUNDRY
A small bench of PhD-level engineers, deliberately kept that way.
Square One Foundry exists because the hardest phase of a hardware venture is the one where you cannot yet justify a team. We are the engineering capacity for that phase — senior enough to make architectural calls without supervision, small enough that the people you meet are the people who build.
Doctoral-level engineering, with the scar tissue of having shipped.
The bench is built from research-trained engineers who then went and built products in industry — a combination that matters more than either half alone. Academic depth is what lets us take on a problem nobody has solved before; having shipped at an early-stage hardware company is what stops us designing something elegant that cannot be manufactured, funded, or maintained. Between us the team has carried work through biochips and microfabrication, analytical and diagnostic instruments, implantable microelectronics, sensing systems, radar, and the full electronics-to-cloud stack that surrounds all of them.
Three things we believe, that show up in the work.
The most valuable thing feasibility work produces is often the decision not to build something. We will tell you the approach does not work, or that you are a stage earlier than you thought, before we will sell you a prototype that was never going to survive contact with a user.
Subsystems that each work perfectly in isolation routinely fail the moment they are assembled, and no single specialist can be held accountable for that. Holding all five disciplines in one team means nobody gets to say the problem lives in someone else’s scope.
A prototype that only one person on earth can assemble is a demonstration, not a step toward a product. We make tolerancing, sourcing and manufacturability decisions early, while they are still cheap, rather than discovering them during a transfer.
Headquartered in Atlanta. Building for founders nationwide.
Our HQ sits in the Atlanta metro, inside a research and manufacturing corridor that gives us access to fabrication, characterization and testing facilities most small teams cannot justify owning. That is where our benches are — it is not the boundary of who we work with. We take on programs with founders across the country, and we meet each one wherever its hardware, its pilot sites and its manufacturing partners happen to be.
1111 Chastain Rd NW
Kennesaw, GA 30144