Iván Hernández Dalas: Root Access develops tool for engineers of embedded systems, raises funding
Root Access applies AI to firmware development for embedded systems. Source: Root Access
Much of the development efforts around robots and other embedded systems are focused on hardware and software. However, firmware is often left behind, noted Ryan Eppley, CEO of Root Access Inc. That is why he and Samarpita Chowdhury co-founded the company, which today announced $2.1 million in pre-seed funding.
New York-based Root Access has built an “AI-native” tool for embedded systems engineers. The company‘s goal is to enable them to modify heavy machinery, robotics, and mission-critical hardware with less time and effort.
“Users can take a component off the shelf, run it through our system, and validate it so that when you use our Hideout IDE [integrated development environment], we know that it will not hallucinate,” Eppley told The Robot Report. “That takes a lot of internal data, but we’ve spent the time because customers aren’t using their own algorithms to validate motherboards. They’re using us as a proxy of trust to use AI to configure mission-critical hardware. That’s something we’re very excited about.”
Founders join forces to facilitate firmware
Eppley and Chowdhury bring very different but complementary experiences to Root Access.
“I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, working on a farm,” Eppley recalled. “Since I was 12 years old, I had been driving around tractors, and I had the privilege of being able to use backhoes before I could drive a car legally on the road.”
Eppley’s wide-ranging interests included soccer, chess, and StarCraft. In fact, he played Division 1 soccer at the University of San Francisco while majoring in political science and philosophy.
“In college, I’d go to a hackathon in the San Francisco area on Friday nights, and then poetry slams in Oakland on Saturdays,” said Eppley. “I love technology, but I was often asking, ‘Why? What are we building for?’ I’d usually do the pitches at the end of the hackathons, evangelizing why this idea is so important. I started finding tremendous value in being the most technical non-technical person.”
Root Access founders Ryan Eppley (left) and Samarpita Chowdhury (right). Source: Root Access
He went on to be a database analyst in Oracle’s global enterprise cloud division and the chief operating officer of a venture-backed company designing systems across physical and digital technologies.
By contrast, Chowdhury has been a contributor to open-source math puzzles since she was 7 years old. She got her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Mumbai and dual master’s in electrical engineering and applied mathematics from New York University, where she studied robotics.
“Pita has tremendous depth in hardware. She designed motherboards for the military and has seven patents,” said Eppley. “She was a senior hardware engineer at Novanta and then grew in software development, writing firmware and test scripts.”
“We met at a hardware meetup in Manhattan, and I remember thinking within five minutes that Samarpita might be the smartest person in the room,” he said. “I looked at her as an early customer to give me ideas about the product, but she hit me up the next day and was like, ‘What if I was your co-founder?’ That was a great idea.”
Both Eppley and Chowdhury realized that there is a need for something between PCB (printed circuit board) design tools and the rest of the technology stack.
Root Access finds strong interest from developers
Root Access incorporated in 2024 and had more than 100 engineers sign up for its open beta, which it had to close.
“We had some really great firmware and embedded engineers from Mitsubishi, HP, Lockheed Martin, and John Deere,” said Eppley. “They were all signing up and saying, ‘Hey, I feel I feel left behind because I see all these AI developer tools, but they’re not for me.’ Everybody knows what a hardware engineer is and what a software engineer is.”
“Well, we’re going to bring light to this mission-critical part of the stack, because it’s becoming the bottleneck,” he added. “Think about the cars we grew up in versus the cars we drive today, with all the bells and whistles that have been added. Now apply that to heavy machinery like a bulldozer, a tractor, a tank, or a satellite. Everything is so peripheral-heavy, with sensors, gauges, actuators, gearboxes, and motors. Everything’s electrified. It’s really hard to swap out components and deliver products to customers fast.”
Root Access says its IDE can help embedded systems developers across industries. Source: Root Access
Hideout and Seb apply AI to embedded systems
When large OEMs design a new system like an autonomous tractor, not only do they have to consider the cost of, say, 10,000 lidars or microcontrollers, but they also need to think about system architectures and the cost of implementing each component, explained Eppley. By certifying products on Root Access’ firmware, the programming of such hardware can go down from weeks to days, he asserted.
Hideout is a “universal” IDE for programming hardware, according to Root Access. Users can configure peripherals, generate firmware, compile across toolchains, and validate code before it is on the board.
“The AI agent inside Hideout is Seb,” said Eppley. “It’s like Cognition AI, which has the Windsurf IDE and the Devin agent. Customers typically have to use different tools for each embedded system, but we’re trying to flip the industry on its head.”
What does “AI-native” mean? “We use our own fine-tuned models and our own RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] system to generate custom firmware for your entire hardware system,” Eppley replied. “So we’re not using boilerplate templates for the hardware out of the box. Instead, we ingest data sheets from the hardware vendors, and then we create a GitHub repository based off of all that we ingest.”
Root Access has signed a strategic partnership with Altium in which its API (application programming interface) pulls schematics directly from Altium into its IDE. It can ingest millions of datasheets from Octopart, which is now under Renesas.
“Everything is based off of LLMs [large language models] that we’ve either developed in house as fine-tuned off of some of the big models, or we’re indexing code bases to have the hardware context,” said Eppley. “Our solution is very unique, because it’s not just just imagining, like code generation. Instead, it’s much more of a systems understanding, and then it pieces together the firmware to make that system come to life.”
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Accelerators and investors boost Root Access
Root Access has been involved with several accelerators, including the NVIDIA Inception Program, AWS Activate, Perplexity for Startups, and the New York City Founder Fellowship. Eppley is also in the Startup Leadership Program, and Chowdhury is part of the Nasdaq Milestones Program.
AlleyCorp led Root Access’ pre-seed funding, with participation from Forum Ventures, Gold House Ventures, Purdue Angels, and Mana Ventures. Angel investors included Garuth Acharya, Karan Mehta, Marshall Singer, and an anonymous U.S. Department of Defense uncrewed systems expert.
“This is a true American dynamism moment, because right now, 90% of all actuators in robots made in America are not sourced from American manufacturers,” Eppley said. “If we can say, ‘Hey, Texas Instruments, I’d love for you to sell way more components this year by giving you leverage with Hideout, and your customers can get to market faster.'”
The startup already counts Mitsubishi Electric and East West Manufacturing as customers. Root Access is hiring for three founding engineer roles: firmware/embedded engineer, AI/machine learning engineer, and software engineer.
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