GrabCAD, which offers an online community and cloud-based collaboration tools for those involved in designing and building physical products, has raised an $8.15 million series B round led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investor David Sacks (co-founder of Yammer and former chief operating officer of PayPal), and existing investors Atlas Venture, NextView Ventures, and Matrix Partners.
This, says the company, brings GrabCAD’s total funding to around $14 million, having previously disclosed a $1.1m seed round, followed by a $4m Series A.
Meanwhile, GrabCAD says it will use the new capital to accelerate the company’s growth as it builds new collaborative tools to improve the design and communication processes in the “creation of physical products”.
Or another way to think of the company’s mission is to become the ‘GitHub for mechanical engineers‘. It currently offers an online community and marketplace for CAD engineers, along with collaborative tools to share designs and 3D models as a ‘work in progress’ with other engineers, along with clients, customers and other stakeholders in the design process.
The idea is to make it easier for mechanical engineers to collaborate, both amongst themselves by sharing models in an ‘open source’ way and thus reducing duplication, but also with clients by making it infinitely quicker to get feedback.
This pits it against a number of competitors, including Sunglass, a company that made its private beta debut back at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, and publicly launched this October.
In June, we reported that GrabCAD (headquartered in Boston, with development offices in Estonia) had reached a major milestone, growing its online community to 250,000, up from 70,000 in January, a stat that it claimed was equivalent to 10% of the world’s mechanical engineers based on published figures of CAD software ‘seats’ or user licences. That was some fuzzy logic, but as I noted at the time, certainly suggests that the company has decent traction. And it would seem, following today’s new funding round, investors have taken notice too.
Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that takes a value-added, hands-on approach to support its portfolio companies. Charles River Ventures is one of the nation’s oldest and most successful early-stage venture capital firms with approximately $2.1 billion under management. CRV is dedicated to helping exceptional entrepreneurs turn their ideas into the next category leaders in high growth technology and media sectors. Since its founding in 1970, CRV funds have been ranked among the industry’s...
David O. Sacks is the Founder and CEO of Yammer, Inc. Sacks was previously the COO of PayPal until its acquisition by eBay. Subsequently, he founded Geni.com, a family tree building and networking website. He also produced and financed the hit movie Thank You For Smoking. David recently sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. David holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Founded in 1980, Atlas Venture is a venture capital firm with offices in Boston, London, Munich and Paris. Atlas currently manages over $2.5 billion in capital and invests in the technology and life sciences industries.
NextView Ventures is a seed-stage VC firm focused on internet-enabled businesses, both consumer-facing and B2B.
Matrix Partners is a US based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early stage companies in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Internet and wireless sectors. Matrix Partners has offices in Waltham, MA, Palo Alto, CA, Mumbai, India and Beijing, China.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
