{"id":82619,"title":"Saphira: Vanta for hardware","tagline":"The easiest way to get safety certified.","body":"**tl;dr: Hardware companies** use [Saphira](https://saphira.ai/) to easily **generate safety reports** and **get certified to sell** their product.\n\nWe’re [Oscar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/oavatare/) and [Akshay](https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaychalana/), and we’ve built software for hardware and compliance at Twitter, Tesla, Amazon, and Hyperloop. \n\nWe’re making it really easy to get **UL, CE, ISO, and TÜV** certifications like **ISO 10218** and **ISO 26262** for hardware products.\n\n![](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfgRUpv-5EuNnEHb2YIIuVzkGDYVFRp2ZwD4LryC9TKyufX-m6IO4V8qlC90YErv5esvNgJjWF-CXaxHa1OwaBKHuRCZarwEg_h8aBjzqPVt9kxFd-aQB_m8D_SL7nwOyiLf1k0h07SsyflNQUdd_184BAh?key=Migms48Dt65ISx6x08AVig)\n\n# What are safety certifications, and who needs them?\n\nBuilding **industrial machinery** that can hurt someone, like robot arms and autonomous trucks?  Your **customers will mandate** TÜV safety certification per particular ISO and IEC standards!  \n\nBuilding **small appliances** that plug into the grid?  Many **retailers won’t sell your product,** and **commercial buildings won’t install** it unless you’re UL or CE certified!  \n\nBuilding a **satellite or communication system**?  The **FCC won’t allow** it to operate without certification!\n\nBuilding **defense equipment** for the government?  **They won’t buy** it unless it’s compliant with the relevant MIL-STDs!\n\n# Why did we start Saphira?\n\nHardware products can’t get to market because teams **don’t know how to navigate the certification process**. Unlike SaaS, there are no tools like Vanta that tell you exactly what you need to test, change, and re-evaluate in your designs to pass audits. This sucks because every hardware company we talk to gets stuck in **rework cycles** with their consultants and auditors that they call **“horrendous and intimidating”** (real customer quote).\n\nWe've seen this at Amazon and Tesla, where engineers don't know when a change breaks certification. Each iteration requires them to work with consultants to understand what broke, lengthening the time to launch.\n\nWe created Saphira to empower these innovators to **rapidly** build complex products **that actually work**, all while achieving and maintaining compliance with the **evolving regulatory landscape**.\n\n# What does Saphira do?\n\nSaphira tells you exactly what you need to account for in your **design and testing** to **achieve and maintain** hardware safety certification and compliance. We’re a centralized data source for the **requirements, tests, and standards** that are relevant to your product, making it straightforward to **identify and triage safety and compliance risks** without wasting months of time and thousands of dollars on **slow safety consultants**.\n\nSaphira automates **traceability**: regulatory reports by engineers that prove that requirements like “the robot arm won’t shock an attendant if touched while in motion” were implemented and validated. These reports are **painful and tedious** to produce. By maintaining references to all necessary source information, Saphira can automatically generate these reports, and even automatically identify which additional standard clauses are relevant to each requirement or design value.\n\n![](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfaxD8bMvNCW5gDewAe4uowrZviZqV3i00DsW2NM-2eVsuZCkRj_4t0oGKIJljGp0GTnS_AFmLlm1qLNUF4teYn5VTi6ZDyM1HtM1Vl56x3t0O4AKTWSq6FtmddRQWAtpes92noQLkImJgftBhWOqOKmWf0?key=Migms48Dt65ISx6x08AVig)\n\n# Who is Saphira for?\n\nSaphira is for engineers at hardware organizations of any scale and size:\n\n* The **safety engineering team** at an industrial robotics company can use Saphira’s **compliance report generator** (i.e. ISO-12100 and ISO-10218) to **achieve certification** to operate in the US.\n* An **engineering leader** at a hardware startup that needs UL certs to sell to more customers can use Saphira to speed up their process by months by avoiding hiring a slow safety consultant. \n* A **systems engineer** at an aerospace/defense company can use Saphira’s **AI tooling** to understand **how various military and government standards** (such as MIL-STD-810 or ISO-26262) are relevant to each facet of their specs and models.\n\n# Ask\n\n* We are experts in certifications for hardware companies.  If you think you might need this but aren't sure how to approach it, we are happy to help for free — [just reach out](mailto:akshay@saphira.ai).\n* If you know other engineering leaders seeking to improve their certification processes, [connect us](mailto:akshay@saphira.ai)! We are most interested in talking to leaders in industrial robotics, energy systems, autos, aeros, and defense. \n* If you worked at a larger hardware company before and saw any of these issues, we would love to talk just to learn from your experience\n* We would love product feedback: [book a demo](https://calendly.com/ac2zoom/30min)!","slug":"LUZ-saphira-vanta-for-hardware","created_at":"2024-07-31T18:47:18.084Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T02:21:07.960Z","total_vote_count":81,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/LUZ-saphira-vanta-for-hardware","share_image_url":"https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfgRUpv-5EuNnEHb2YIIuVzkGDYVFRp2ZwD4LryC9TKyufX-m6IO4V8qlC90YErv5esvNgJjWF-CXaxHa1OwaBKHuRCZarwEg_h8aBjzqPVt9kxFd-aQB_m8D_SL7nwOyiLf1k0h07SsyflNQUdd_184BAh?key=Migms48Dt65ISx6x08AVig","company":{"id":29588,"name":"Saphira AI","slug":"saphira-ai","url":"https://saphira.ai","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/50fee2cba3e02a1824e08a39a9224adb0d2098b5.png","batch":"Summer 2024","industry":"B2B","tags":["Hardware","Robotics","Compliance","Enterprise","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/29588"}}