Apr 8, 2020
Valispace helps engineers collaborate and reduce complexity with a “Single Source of Truth”. Here’s why we invested.
We are excited to lead the $2.4m pre-Series A financing round for Bremen-based Valispace, alongside Hardware Club and existing investor High-Tech Gründerfonds. Marco, Louise, and the entire Valispace team have built an exceptional collaboration tool to empower engineers in uncertain times, facilitating a more streamlined engineering process.
Engineers encounter incredible amounts of data while developing complex hardware. More often than not, that data is stored across tens of thousands of documents and spread across large groups of engineers. Without streamlined and central organization, hardware engineers end up spending 86% of their time on non-engineering tasks such as searching, reading and writing documentation.
Valispace enters the equation as a “Single Source of Truth” collaboration platform for hardware engineers that increases teams’ overall efficiency. Our team at JOIN Capital proudly announces that we’ve backed the Valispace team in a $2.4 million pre-Series A round, which will enable the company to expand into new industries (e.g, medical devices, robotics) and strengthen its presence in existing ones (e.g, aeronautics, space, energy, automotive).
Valispace’s pioneering solution allows engineers to input their latest values into a centralized platform, which then re-calculates all physically connected values, reruns simulations, updates documentation and notifies affected engineers. It is a platform that complements engineers’ existing toolkits throughout the lifecycle of a project, bringing a real-time flow to essential processes and minimizing routine, non-engineering tasks.
Why we invested in Valispace
Our decision to invest in Valispace was based on a number of interconnected factors.
Business model: An industry agnostic, highly scalable SaaS model.
Valispace’s business model comprises a fixed annual SaaS fee for both the cloud and on-premise versions. This allows flexible implementation, as customers start with a single project before expanding to a company-wide application. The result is natural upselling inside teams and adjusted pricing based on usage. We also like Valispace’s strong lock-in effect: engineering projects can last several years and are often allocated several million dollars, so once the software is implemented, companies fully harness the power of the “Single Source of Truth”.
Market timing: Increasingly remote teams and the COVID-19 crisis call for engineering collaboration solutions.
The total engineering software market is estimated at $16 billion, with many large industrial companies focusing on digitizing their engineering toolchain with an increasingly remote workforce. Valispace is positioned to take over the market lead at a critical time. It is also serving as an ideal collaboration hub for hardware engineers developing essential equipment during the COVID-19 crisis.
Value proposition: Complexity reduction with easy integration.
Early hardware design choices have the biggest impact on cost and schedule; therefore, design traceability becomes a matter of survival for engineering companies. Good management of data in a document-based approach to engineering is essential, especially for companies that build complex hardware on short product cycles. Valispace is for any company that requires infrastructure to enable easy instrumentation and data access for all stakeholders involved in projects.
Technology: Large-scale collaboration on the cloud and on-premise.
In a field where collaboration is key, Valispace offers the most seamless and reliable solution. Tens of thousands of engineers can access and contribute to all phases of the engineering lifecycle of a single design. Available both on the cloud and on-premise, Valispace’s solution is an efficient tool for the increasingly remote workforce and for geographically spread teams. The novelty of Valispace lies in its ability to integrate existing data management and requirement management software with simulation tools. The real-time review, calculation, simulation and documentation updates from Valispace are a real value-add recognized by customers and subcontractors alike.
Team: Founding engineers who know their niche.
Former satellite engineers, Louise and Marco, understand first-hand the pain point that their product solves. Indeed, Marco and Louise worked on large-scale satellite projects and got frustrated with a broken status quo before deciding to launch their own product. Their experience in engineering and leadership makes them more than capable to scale the unique and exciting solution they’ve built.
Traction: Utilized by geographically spread engineering teams for large global companies.
Prominent multinationals — including but not limited to Airbus, BMW and the European Space Agency (ESA) — count on Valispace to be a Single Source of Truth for their engineers. We’re confident the list will grow significantly in the coming year across a broad range of industries.
To get started with harnessing the power of collaboration within your engineering teams, try the online Valispace demo. For additional questions or comments, drop us a line at hello@join.capital. Learn more about Valispace’s involvement in fighting against COVID-19 via TechCrunch.
