Trace × Pikkolo: Our First Manufacturing Partnership

We're partnering with Pikkolo Assembly, a US-based PCB assembly house in Denver, as our first manufacturing partner. Starting now (in beta), Trace users can ship finished designs straight from the editor into a real production line -- populated, inspected, and boxed in America.

Pikkolo's core is assembly -- taking a bare PCB and populating it with real components. They now also offer US-based PCB fabrication (beta), so they can handle the full pipeline from bare board to assembled product under one roof. Your choice of where the bare board comes from: Pikkolo can fabricate it in-house, Trace can hand it off to a fab partner on your behalf, or you can ship your own. Pikkolo handles everything from there: BOM sourcing from DigiKey, Mouser, and Arrow; kitting; laser-cut stainless steel stencils for every job; SMT assembly on custom snap-in trays; AOI; final inspection; boxing. Boards can ship in as little as 24 hours.

We picked Pikkolo as our first partner on purpose. They're small, fast, US-based, and -- the part that matters most to us -- they're building software on top of hardware instead of around it.

Why Pikkolo

A normal turnkey assembly flow looks like this: you upload Gerbers, a BOM, and a pick-and-place file. A human on the other end spends an hour clicking through your design, aligning the board in CAM software, loading reels into the pick-and-place machine one at a time, matching component rotations against what the PnP expects, and babysitting the first few boards off the line. If anything is wrong -- a rotation off by 90°, a footprint that doesn't match the part, a BOM line that's been discontinued -- the line stops and someone emails you.

Pikkolo has been systematically automating that hour.

They trained a YOLO model that detects component placement and rotations on the build plate using camera vision. No more aligning by hand. They automated their feeder setup on their LumenPnP using CLIP embeddings and frontier scanning -- the machine scans the build plate, classifies what it sees, and autonomously generates the feeder configuration. What used to be an hour of clicking to set up 50 feeders is now a few minutes of autonomous scanning. That's the kind of software-on-hardware compounding that actually moves unit economics in US assembly, where labor eats margins.

We want the whole manufacturing stack to compound like that. Pikkolo is the proof point we're starting from.

What's Live

• Direct submission from Trace. No portal, no separate uploads, no re-entering parameters. The AI autofills the order from your .trace_pcb.
• BOM sourcing. Pikkolo sources parts from DigiKey, Mouser, and Arrow using the distributor IDs Trace already attaches to your components. No manual MPN matching -- upload a BOM in nearly any format and Pikkolo's system instantly matches to best-fit, in-stock parts across vendors.
• Three PCB sourcing modes. (1) Ship your own bare boards to Pikkolo. (2) Have Pikkolo fabricate bare boards in-house (US-based fab, now in beta). (3) Have Trace ship Gerbers to one of our fab partners and route the bare boards to Pikkolo automatically.
• DRC presets. Pikkolo's real process constraints load into your project at design time. Catch process violations before you submit.
• Live order tracking. See kitting, assembly, AOI, and shipping stages from inside Trace.
• US-based. Denver, Colorado. No international shipping, no customs, no tariff surprises. ITAR-friendly for the designs that need it.

Trace is Step 0 of the Automated Line

A modern SMT line is a chain of machines that talk to each other. A bare board goes in one end: the stencil printer lays paste, SPI scans it in 3D to catch bad prints, pick and place grabs components off reels with multiple heads and vision that self-corrects misalignment, the reflow oven locks everything in at ~217°C on a SAC305 profile, AOI scans every joint catching bridges and tombstoning and missing parts at near 99.9% accuracy. The board comes out the other end. No humans in the loop between load and unload. If AOI flags a defect spike, it pings the reflow oven to re-check its thermal profile.

That line is only as fast and reliable as its inputs. If the Gerbers are noisy, if the BOM has bad part numbers, if the pick-and-place file has wrong rotations, the whole chain stalls or silently produces scrap. Trace sits at step 0. We generate the stencil files, the pick-and-place CPL coordinates, the DRC-validated Gerbers, and a BOM with real distributor part numbers automatically from the design. When a board comes off Trace, everything downstream already has what it needs to run.

Pikkolo is what happens when the rest of the chain is as software-native as Trace is. That's the bet.

US Fabrication

Since this post was written, Pikkolo has launched their own US-based PCB fabrication (in beta). They can now handle both bare-board fab and assembly under one roof in Denver -- meaning the entire pipeline from Gerbers to assembled product stays domestic with a single partner. We're still interested in additional fabrication partners building toward a dark-foundry model: automated lines with no humans between load and unload.

If you're running an automated line, standing up bare-board capacity, or building toward this, we have customers who need boards made. Trace will be the software brain of whatever line you stand up.

Head to the partnerships page or email us directly.

How to Use It

Trace × Pikkolo is rolling out this week to beta members first. You'll see "Send to Manufacturer" surfaced in the export flow, and the AI will offer Pikkolo as a destination when you finish a design that needs assembly. Available on Pro, Pro Team, Ultra, Ultra Team, and On-Demand plans when it opens to everyone.

If you don't have a Trace account yet, download Trace and try it. Design a board, click ship, get boards.

More partners coming. We announced our second manufacturing partnership with PCBWay -- read about it here.

— Olu Afolabi
Co-Founder & COO, Trace