Onshape Nabs $80M From Andreessen, Others for cell CAD software
Jeff Engel September 24, 2015
Hardware engineers designing and tweaking merchandise with pc tool have traditionally been chained to their desks. but like most industries, these employees are increasingly going cell, using smartphones and tablets to complete their work.
That requires new laptop-aided design instrument that lives on the net, allowing scattered colleagues to speedy share information and mechanically update documents with adjustments. one of the corporations providing this type of product, Cambridge, MA-primarily based Onshape, simply got an enormous endorsement from some big-title buyers.
Onshape these days introduced an $ eighty million fairness funding round led via Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from present traders New endeavor friends, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and North Bridge mission companions. Andreessen Horowitz is the neatly-recognized Silicon Valley VC firm that was an early investor in fb, Twitter, Airbnb, Pinterest, Skype, and different well-known tech startups.
Onshape has raised $ a hundred and forty four million total from buyers seeing that its 2012 founding. the company says it’ll use the new money for improved gross sales and advertising and marketing international and to juice up its analysis and development and customer service. It’s also including a few dozen folks to its present staff of round eighty workers, most positioned in Cambridge. It has extra staff primarily based in others parts of the U.S., the U.k., and India, advertising and marketing director Darren Henry says in an e mail.
“we are overjoyed to have a strong vote of self assurance from Andreessen Horowitz as we prepare to move out of beta and enlarge our international presence,” Onshape CEO John McEleney says in a press liberate.
The Boston space is house to a number of startups involved in aiding the method of designing and manufacturing bodily products. Others embrace Cambridge-based totally GrabCAD, a company with a device product much like Onshape, which used to be got closing yr by way of 3D printing massive Stratasys (NASDAQ: SSYS). And Somerville-based Formlabs just unveiled the newest model of its desktop 3D printer.
Onshape, previously often called Belmont expertise, says its CAD tool can run in a laptop web browser, as well as on smartphones and pills. It offers the flexibility to share documents straight away and allows everybody to work on the same master CAD information—no file copies or “overwriting each other’s work,” the company says.
Onshape says its software doesn’t require any IT reinforce, so no installation, no licenses, and no updates to regulate.
Six months after Onshape’s beta launch, greater than 10,000 CAD mavens are the usage of its tool to assist design consumer electronics, medical gadgets, computing device parts, industrial tools, and different merchandise, the company says.
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