[e-_pusher]

You are not wrong overall, but I am not sure if the opportunity is huge, at least IMO not enough to sustain a VC-backed company (or perhaps barely). As a benchmark, Altium has a market cap of 6B. The fundamental problem is that there aren't that many HW engineers out there (compared to SWEs and SWE adjacents like DevOps etc). And the existing players are super entrenched into existing companies doing HW design.

There are some interesting companies out there that I am watching, like flux.io. The problem there is that none of these companies are working on creating open-source tooling, so their endgame seems to be getting acquired by Altium, Cadence et al.

I fear a future where doing even regular PCB designs will be gatekept by the Cadences and Synopysyes of the world, akin to how IC design is today. At least we have KiCad right now, which is getting really powerful and is fantastic for doing PCB development work.