Five days ago, Zenode launched Alts.
Give Zenode Alts a part number. It runs a full intake analysis, extracts specs, pinouts, and package info from datasheets, searches 40M+ components across dozens of distributors, and returns ranked alternates for that electronic component, scored on functional match, availability, and lifecycle. The whole process takes minutes.
Before Alts, that same search took weeks. Engineers cross-referenced PDFs by hand, checked stock one distributor at a time, and compared pinouts in parallel browser tabs. Every week of delay in that process is a week the design clock isn’t running.
In Future #3: Hardware in Months, Not Years, we wrote that the AI-first hardware tooling layer would compress design, prototype, and manufacture timelines. We were talking about the full arc. But compression doesn’t only happen at the macro level. It happens in the smaller cycles embedded inside a hardware build: the sourcing decision, the component qualification, the redesign triggered by a part going end-of-life. Alts is that compression, applied to one of the most painful points in the cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQeAisLDuI
Why this problem is acute right now
Six major supply chain disruptions since 2018\. 620,000 parts discontinued last year, up 25% year over year. That’s not a background condition engineers can plan around once and move on. It’s a recurring event that hits active production lines and development schedules alike.
Zenode’s launch post last week described the human cost plainly: a VR company spent two weeks finding alternates for a 10-cent battery chip. By the time they finished, two of their three options had already sold out. An automotive company reportedly put a $1,000 bounty on the same chip just to keep their lines moving. Both companies paid for the delay; one in chip premiums, one in NRE costs and a delayed launch.
The current tools for this problem are expensive and narrow. They match on specs and stop there, leaving engineers to do the real qualification work by hand.
What Brandon and Collin built
Brandon Bourn and Collin Stoner are both EEs. They built Alts because they lived the problem. Two years of building. As they put it in the launch post:
“We’ve been building this for two years. As EEs, we know how painful this process is. That’s why we built the tool we always wanted.”
That framing matters. Alts was scoped by people who have sat in front of a distributor’s website at 11pm cross-referencing a 40-page datasheet. The tool reflects that. It surfaces what matches, what’s close, and what’s different, so engineers can make a confident swap instead of guessing.
Pricing starts at $50 per month. There’s a free tier to try it.
Why Bee backed this
We backed Brandon and Collin before Alts shipped. We backed them because of what they saw: that hardware engineers are doing search and qualification work that is deeply amenable to AI, and that the existing tooling has not kept up. The market has been slow to serve this buyer because the buyer is technical, the problem looks narrow from the outside, and the switching costs on bad solutions are high enough that engineers have tolerated the pain rather than risk a worse outcome.
Brandon and Collin knew the tolerance wasn’t infinite. At some part-discontinuation rate, at some cost of delay, the “just do it manually” answer breaks down. We’re past that threshold.
Alts is a first proof. Zenode’s roadmap has more of the hardware workflow in scope. This is the kind of shipping moment we back founders for.
Follow along
Try Alts the next time a part goes EOL or a quote comes in too high. Drop in the part number and see how it ranks the alternates. Free to start at zenode.ai/alts; for a walkthrough of the full workflow, watch the product demo.
– Try Alts: zenode.ai/alts – Follow Brandon: linkedin.com/in/brandonbourn – Follow Collin: linkedin.com/in/collin-stoner-33709425 – Follow Zenode: linkedin.com/company/zenode