NOA Labs

NOA Labs is a German-run product development and manufacturing firm with one foot in Berlin and the other in Bao'an, Shenzhen. It covers the whole road from idea to market: industrial design, electronics, firmware, apps, prototypes, validation, certification and contract manufacturing. Clients can pick any stretch of it. Its sister brand, Smart Prototyping, is the quick-turn PCB and prototype shop many makers meet first.

Alex Murawski, a German engineer with a master's in mechatronics, founded NOA Labs in 2012, and it calls itself "a German company". In 2018 NOA was introduced as Smart Prototyping's parent: a turnkey house for design, development, prototyping, crowdfunding and mass production. Between them the two brands have delivered more than 10,000 PCBs, PCBAs and mechanical prototypes to around 10,000 customers. NOA's startup clients have raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The US is its biggest market, and a Texas office is planned.

The homepage doesn't undersell. It describes a team of 100-plus with alumni of Apple, NASA, Airbus, BMW, SpaceX, Bosch, Foxconn and TÜV. Apple, Dell, Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Kohler, Schneider Electric and Boehringer Ingelheim are named as clients, though most clients are SMEs and startups from programmes like HAX, Brinc, Y Combinator and Shark Tank. The engineering menu goes deep. There's DFM and cost-down work, EVT, DVT and PVT validation builds, and DFMEA risk analysis. There are HALT and HASS stress tests, IP68 and drop testing, and explosion-proof ATEX/IECEx work. Add automated test equipment and certification for CE, FCC, UL and FDA.

On the production side there's PCB and flex assembly, 3D printing and CNC, injection molding with hard and soft tooling, die casting, metal injection molding, sheet metal and extrusion, final assembly, and warehousing and fulfilment. NOA makes products in Germany, China, Vietnam, Mexico and the USA through its partner network, though the site doesn't say which steps happen in-house. The team is multilingual, and you can get in touch in any language.

NOA Labs suits startups and companies in Europe and North America that want one Western-managed partner for design, engineering and scale-up, especially for electronics that need serious validation or certification. If you'd rather deal directly with a single factory, go straight to a manufacturer.