Two ISE students who met on a department factory tour co-founded HERA, a Y Combinator-backed startup with $550,000 in pre-seed funding. The startup's software compresses the manual mechanical design review that once consumed senior engineers into a single automated step.
Sep 2026University of Washington Industrial & Systems EngineeringNews article
HERA, led by CEO Meera Patel and CTO Noelle Cho, checks custom metal-part drawings for standards-related errors before manufacturing. It reviews GD&T callouts, tolerance stack-ups, and title-block requirements in minutes against ASME Y14.5 and relevant ISO standards; these checks are otherwise performed by hand before drawings reach a machine.
University of Washington students developed 20 ventures through DubHacks Next, a 16-week startup incubator, including Hera, a manufacturing design tool. Co-creator Meera Patel says Hera answers design questions 10 times faster than a senior engineer and is already live in three plants.
