Our Mission

Imagine a world-class kitchen at peak hour. The dining room is full, and the patrons are waiting. But instead of cooking, the head chef is locked in the back office, filling out ledgers and counting tomatoes.

This is the state of Physical AI and hardware development today. Our most brilliant engineers—the ones who should be shaping the future—are paralyzed by administrative friction. They lose approximately 50% of their workday to manual documentation just to keep management informed and junior technicians aligned. They are trapped doing paperwork. The industry is caught between two opposing forces: the work must not stop, and the work must be documented perfectly.

The Software Delusion

The prevailing industry narrative assumes we can simply transpose the software playbook onto physical engineering. In software, the front end is entirely decoupled from the back. A website can have a messy, decades-old backend but still present a flawless, beautiful user interface. McMaster for example, has a UI that looks like it belongs in the early 2000s while it performs like a website from 2050. When an engineer makes a change, they just push code. But in hardware, there is no decoupling. If a builder discovers a necessary design change, they cannot simply push a digital update. They have to break their flow state, stop the physical build, source a new component, manually update the BOM, write an incident report, create an SOP for a potential fix and alert procurement. The momentum dies instantly.

Hardware is unforgiving. You cannot patch physics. A jerry-rigged PCB cannot be hidden beneath a beautifully machined aluminum chassis. The ethos that led to the team producing that PCB ensures that the external changes or integration will fall short. Consider the Humane AI Pin: a stunning, meticulously crafted exterior that failed critically because the underlying hardware could not escape basic thermal realities. Great hardware demands a unified ethos from the atomic level up; it requires an unbroken chain of intent between the designer’s mind and the physical object.

The Origin & Our Stakes

I have been building hardware since I was 12 years old. From engineering Formula Student cars and autonomous vehicles in college, to doing CAD for defense labs, designing subassemblies for automotive companies, and robotics startups; I have lived this exact frustration. I have personally watched visionary teams grind to a halt under the weight of manual process and disjointed supply chains.

I have wanted to solve this forever. Today, advances in AI finally provide the tools to build a better way. At Matobas, our core mission is dedicated to this exact challenge: fundamentally transforming how hardware is brought into existence.

The Reframe

Observers may look at Matobas and assume we are just another automation tool or operational dashboard for the hardware lifecycle. But really, we are uncaging craftsmanship.

What We Believe

We don’t replace the craftsmen; we replace the management. We believe the physical act of building should be the documentation itself. When an engineer swaps a component or iterates on a prototype, they should not have to shatter their flow state to update a spreadsheet. By pairing zero-friction hardware that stays entirely out of the technician’s way with an AI system that translates physical actions into a flawless chronological ground truth, we allow the builder to simply build. The software seamlessly updates the supply chain, alters the standard operating procedures, and prepares predictive purchase orders in the background while the engineer keeps their hands on the prototype.

We choose empowerment over abstraction. We do not strip away the specific knowledge our designers hold; we give them unprecedented control to shape the entire system without the burden of administrative translation. They design. They iterate. They build. They invent.

The Credo

Great hardware is not managed into existence. It is crafted.

Join the Kitchen

The institutions that have successfully etched their names into history—design houses like Pininfarina, Apple, Dyson, and Herman Miller—do so because they treat hardware as an uncompromising art form. They do not let process stifle the product. We are building Matobas to let every physical engineering team operate with that exact reverence and speed, turning the physical lab into a continuous loop of creation rather than a bottleneck of paperwork. If you are tired of counting tomatoes while the world starves for true physical innovation, join us in the kitchen.