Peek into any of the commercial garages dotting San Francisco's Mission District and you'll find a mix of auto body shops and startups working on gleaming black-and-silver gizmos. On an intensely sunny afternoon in April, Shaper's staff rolled up its garage door to reveal a cluster of workbenches--all made by Shaper's handheld woodcutting tool, Origin, which goes on sale today. You may not think of yourself as a woodworker, but the founders of Shaper can change that. The tool is built to take the mystery--and most of the skill--out of cutting even complex shapes from a piece of wood. Grab Origin by the handles, place it on a piece of wood, and start tracing along the edges of the shape on Origin's touchscreen.

In a tidy workshop in San Francisco's Mission District, Joe Hebenstreit is surrounded by a curvy wooden chair, a carbon-fiber drone chassis, a beanbag-toss game, a copper bracelet, a carefully cut slab of kitchen counter top -- and the machine his company used to make all of them. Hebenstreit, formerly the lead design engineer of Google Glass computerized eyewear, now is chief executive of Shaper. The nine-person startup on Monday night began sales of a camera-enhanced, computer-guided cutting tool called the Origin. It tracks its own location so it can handle high-precision positioning as it guides you through a job. "It's like autocorrect for your hands," Hebenstreit said.