Colare Raises $2.5M to Staff the $35.6B Defense Tech Wave
Colare raised $2.5M from Afore, Garage and Acadian for simulation-based assessments that let aerospace and hardware teams test engineers before interviews.
Colare, a San Francisco-based tech startup, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from Afore Capital, Garage Capital, and Acadian Ventures. The company specializes in simulation-based assessments to evaluate hardware engineers before they are interviewed, a process that typically takes about 40 hours of senior engineering time.
About half of Colare's clients are in the aerospace and defense sectors. The global space economy reached a record $686 billion in 2025, and defense tech venture deal value reached $35.6 billion in the first half of 2026 alone. The engineering talent bottleneck in the aerospace and defense industries is significant, with attrition rates around 15% and a high proportion of older workforce members.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects around 3,800 aerospace engineer openings per year through 2035. Colare's assessments connect to a customer's applicant tracking system and can be used for various engineering roles, including mechanical, electrical, firmware, embedded, controls, thermal, test, and reliability. The company aims to address the quality of the screening step in the hiring pipeline, which is crucial for hardware engineering roles where there is rarely a single correct answer.
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