Hannes Furmans

Hannes Furmans
Occupation	Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Stillwind
Known for	Co-founding Stillwind, an autonomous electrical engineering company

Hannes Furmans is a German-speaking software engineer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Stillwind, a startup developing tools for autonomous electrical engineering. The company participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch.

Career

Furmans studied computer science at ETH Zurich, where he developed expertise in systems programming, with a particular focus on the Rust programming language. During his studies, he gained experience in distributed systems, embedded software, and machine learning-driven robotics applications. He contributed to the open-source rust-libp2p networking stack and implemented AutoNATv2 NAT-detection improvements under a grant from the Filecoin Foundation. He also prototyped a decentralized end-to-end encrypted messaging system called Dione.

Furmans co-founded Stillwind in 2024 alongside Lukas Ego, Linus Meierhöfer, and Josef Zoller. The company is focused on building tools to automate aspects of the electrical engineering workflow. Its first product, Stillwind Search, is a search engine designed to simplify the process of finding electronic components. The tool uses natural language processing to convert plain-text queries into fine-grained technical specifications, which are then matched against a proprietary database containing millions of electronic parts.

According to the company, existing databases of electronic parts—such as distributor catalogues and datasheet aggregators—typically use coarse-grained schemas and lack the ability to handle queries that combine semantic and exact search criteria simultaneously. Stillwind Search is intended to address these limitations.

Beyond component search, Stillwind's longer-term roadmap includes developing real-time digital simulation tools for electrical engineers and embedded software developers, analog circuit modeling using machine learning methods, firmware-in-the-loop testing, and spatial reasoning capabilities for component placement and routing. The company describes these efforts as steps along a path toward fully autonomous electrical engineering.

Stillwind was accepted into the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch and operates in the areas of AIOps, artificial intelligence, and electronics. As of 2025, the company had four employees and was based in Zurich, Switzerland.