My gut tells me that the software market that serves hardware engineers isn't nearly as creative or ambitious as that on pure software and even devops or infrastructure.
Huge opportunity there.
A lot of the work of a hardware engineer is reading and interpreting datasheets and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. The low-hanging fruit which can easily be automated is the easy part of the job, and writing the input data for the automation ends up taking more time than just manually doing it yourself.
I have dabbled into writing some software extensions for KiCad, and some turned out to be very useful and now save me quite a lot of time. However, every time I tried to be "clever" and solve a seemingly easy problem, it ended up not being worth it in the end.
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.