- The cofounders of CoLab were inspired by their time competing in the Hyperloop design competition.
- They realized mechanical engineering workflows were “antiquated,” especially compared to those in software.
- They just raised a $17 million Series A to become the ‘GitHub’ for mechanical engineering.
Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews, cofounders of startup CoLab, were mechanical engineering students in Canada when they started thinking about why engineers building software had such better tools for collaboration and design reviews than their peers in mechanical engineering.
CoLab, their answer to that question, just raised a $17 million Series A led by New York-based Insight Partners, and Josh Fredberg, an Insight Partners managing director, is joining its board of directors. New and current VCs and angel investors from companies like Xometry, Onshape, GrabCAD, Bosch, Tesla, and Atlassian also participated. This latest round puts CoLab’s total funding at nearly $20 million.
Keating told Insider that although he and Andrews were only students when they formed the idea for CoLab, the issues they encountered were made obvious when they competed in the 2017 Hyperloop competition, an annual SpaceX-sponsored design contest. Keating and Andrews’s university team came in second out of about 1,200 teams that year.
During the competition process, they realized how software tools for mechanical engineers were “antiquated and behind,” making the design of complex machines like space rockets much harder. Shortly after graduation, Keating and Andrews began building CoLab back home in Newfoundland. Since then, they’ve focused on creating tools they wished they had as engineers, Keating said.
Then, in 2019, the cofounders participated in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Keating says the experience was both intimidating and incredibly valuable: “We’re in a smaller place in Canada, and you don’t walk into a room with 200 or 300 startups as talented as those every day,” he said, adding that he and Andrews also learned the importance of focus and gained a network of angel investors.
The most popular tools for PDM (an industry term for product data management) and PLM (the term for product lifecycle management) are SOLIDWORKS and Windchill, Keating says, and combined with tools like Onshape for 3D modeling, they provide “the creation element and the control element.” What’s missing, and what CoLab aims to provide, is the ability to collaborate with those tools — a software layer that stitches them together to help teams share and review engineering designs.
“We spent every single night on
Google Meet
trying to share screens, telling someone to rotate them all a certain way, sending screenshots back and forth on
Slack
. There was no process or anything to help us do it,” Keating said. “We thought it was a student problem. Six months later, we realized that the most innovative teams in the world were behaving the exact same way.”
CoLab, which runs on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, aims to make its product more open and usable than those built by established CAD software companies like Autodesk, Dassault, PTC, and Siemens. Those companies have relatively closed ecosystems, Keating said, making it harder for engineers and designers to work between platforms.
“Ultimately, their approach is to build a bit of collaboration on top of what they do,” Keating said. “Whereas we look at it and say there needs to be a whole new thought process to how people work together.”
With this latest infusion of cash, the 54-person startup plans to double its headcount within the next half year, with a focus on marketing and sales functions. Hiring for those roles will help the company grow its customer base, Keating said, but ultimately, the goal is to create an entirely new framework for engineering workflows.
“If you look at the impact that GitHub had for the software developer ecosystem, where it’s not just software, but it’s an entire way of working, they created a community,” Keating said. “It’s a very similar type of impact that we want to have for people building physical products over the long haul.”
Read the pitch deck CoLab used to raise its $17 million Series A:
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