When Senra CEO Jordan Black was an engineer at SpaceX, he took on the task of expanding the company’s wiring harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket.

Wiring harnesses are what they sound like: the internal electrical wiring that runs through a rocket, car, plane or tractor and becomes increasingly important the smarter those vehicles become. They are custom-made and crafted by technicians who, functionally, are experienced craftsmen.

“I traveled all over the world to visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It really hasn’t changed since the wooden table era of the Cold War. [and] manual processes”.

Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan founded Senra in 2023 to offer a more modern solution to vehicle manufacturers. Today, the startup announces a $65 million Series B round, co-led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, among others.

Serna is not looking to remove humans from the manual manufacturing process, at least not as long as robots find manipulating cables a challenge and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, it is turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of traditional manual work.

The company is benefiting from increased money in the American manufacturing industry, particularly in the defense industrial base. While Black could not reveal the clients, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles to land-based defense vehicle systems, launch vehicles and satellites.”

If it doesn’t seem immediately important, consider a recent wiring harness disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that the wiring on its Starliner spacecraft was held together with flammable tape, forcing a costly delay while the entire wiring system was redone.

Black points to that experience as a reason to raise standards for wiring, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. “Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can lead to catastrophic change down the road,” he said.

Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. The company is also, as it grows, finding ways to automate more processes.

“It goes back to Elon’s principle of ‘automation is the ultimate,'” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on it now, but a lot of it is standardization and building the foundations that made SpaceX able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they build hundreds a year.”

Senra (which, by the way, is “harness” spelled backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company takes the “shit” out of harnesses) produces 1,000 each month in two different factories and plans to increase production to 10,000 per month in 2027.