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VC Intelligence Report

FR4 Machine Shield - The CNC kit from an entire sheet of PCB.

Design — THE FR4 MACHINE SHIELD, THE DIY CNC KIT STARTING AT $350 [Design Tools, Productivity, 3D Printer…
Designhardware-salesest. 2016
▲ Rising
Category standing real
1th pctl · Design
15.7
Signal score
0–100 composite · real
#3,098
Category rank
of 5,141 · real
1th
Universe percentile
vs 79,105 modeled · real
94%
Mortality P(dead)
model est. · model est.

Signal trajectory

real

Signal 6.19.6 across 25 readings (+3.6). Composite of press, GitHub velocity, community heat, liveness and funding.

Cross-sectional profile

percentile rank vs 79,105 modeled products
Signal (universe) real
1
Signal (category) real
1
Profile maturity real
1
Tag breadth real
29
Network position sparse
0
Press footprint sparse
0

Percentiles computed over the modeled cohort (embedding + signal + tags). Sparse dimensions — network and press — reflect that most products have zero, so a single edge or mention lifts the rank; read those with the coverage flag.

Mortality outlook

model estimate
94%
P(inactive)
High risk
Higher risk than 91% of the universe.

This is a model estimate, not a verdict. 78,505 of the 79,105 modeled products are unlabeled and scored by the model only.

  • LightGBM · binary mortality (dead vs surviving)
  • Held-out AUC 0.71 · CV AUC 0.79 ± 0.05 · Brier 0.21
  • Trained on 600 verified labels (150 dead / 450 surviving)
  • Leakage-guarded: excludes status, discontinued_year, profile_maturity
  • Top drivers: tag breadth, signal, vintage, liveness, business model

n=600 is thin → 95% CI on AUC ≈ ±0.10. Treat as a directional signal, not a calibrated probability.

Analyst read

generated from the metrics above · no external narrative

FR4 Machine Shield - The CNC kit from an entire sheet of PCB. sits in the 1th percentile of Launch Sentinel's 79,105-product universe by signal, ranked #3,098 of 5,141 in Design. The mortality model puts its probability of going inactive at 94% — a model estimate with a wide confidence band. It has no curated competitive-alternative edges yet, so the comparable set below is functional tag-similarity — read it with the confidence flags. Signal momentum is positive (WoW +58.9).

Comparable set

curated alternatives → functional tag-similarity
CompanyBasisSignalP(dead)
UI Stencilsdesignsimilar15.792%
Inklethardwaretag-overlap18.655%
Rietveld L40 hanging lamp CHF 887.45designsimilar30.071%
The Native Leather Mouse Padhardwaretag-overlap32.915%
MAGNETIPShardwaretag-overlap15.749%
Grovemade Desk Collectionhardwaretag-overlap15.767%
Studio Casehardwaretag-overlap22.933%
Pen Type-Ahardwaretag-overlap15.767%

Confidence reflects source and category coherence: curated = an editorially linked alternative; similar = strong functional tag-overlap in the same category; tag-overlap = shared tags only and may be noisy. Signal & P(dead) are real / model.

Structure

observed attributes
Business modelhardware-sales
Liveness tierquiet
Open sourceNo
Public APINo
Free tierNo
Enterprise tierNo

Funding & team

not in source

No disclosed funding in our sources. Funding data covers only ~1% of the corpus (462 rounds across 79K products), so absence here is unknown, not zero— we don't estimate a number we can't source.