A SpaceX vet has raised $65 million to pull off Cold War-era wire harnesses

When Senra CEO Jordan Black was an engineer at SpaceX, he took on the task of scaling up the company’s wiring harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next generation of rockets.

Wire harnesses are just what they sound like: internal electrical cables that run through a rocket ship, car, plane or tractor and become increasingly important as those vehicles become smarter. They are custom made by highly experienced technicians and craftsmen.

“I’ve traveled all over the world visiting wiring harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It hasn’t really changed since the Cold War era in terms of wooden tables (and) manual processes.”

Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan created Senra in 2023 to provide a more modern solution to auto manufacturers. Today, the startup is announcing a $65 million Series B round, led by LowerCarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, among others.

Serna isn’t looking to take humans out of the manual manufacturing process — at least not while robots find wire handling challenging, and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, they are turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of traditional manual work.

The company benefits from the flow of money into US manufacturing industries, especially the defense industrial base. While Black could not reveal the customers, he said they include makers of “anything from submarines and marine vehicles, to land-based defense vehicle systems, launch vehicles, and satellites.”

If it doesn’t seem like a big deal right away, consider the recent wiring harness disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that the wiring of its Starliner spacecraft was held together with flammable tape, resulting in a costly delay while the entire wiring system was rebuilt.

Black points to that experience as a reason to raise wiring harness standards, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. “Having all of that in the same program is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can create catastrophic change in the future,” he said.

It uses Senra Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who have been trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally approved wiring harness training program. As it expands, the company is also working on ways to automate more processes.

“It goes back to Elon’s principle of ‘automation is last,'” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on that now, but a lot of it is standardization and building the foundation that SpaceX has been able to scale something like rockets, which you can only build one a year if you’re lucky, and now they’re building hundreds a year.”

Senra — which, by the way, is “harness” spelled backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company is excluding “horsesh*t” from harnesses — produces 1,000 each month across two different factories and plans to ramp up production to 10,000 a month in 2027.