GrabCAD offers an online community, marketplace and cloud-based collaborative tools for CAD and mechanical engineers to share designs and 3D models as work-in-progress with colleagues, clients and other stakeholders. The company positions itself as a "GitHub for mechanical engineers," aiming to streamline design communication and reduce duplication through open sharing. It has shown traction: its community grew to about 250,000 members from 70,000 earlier in the year. GrabCAD will use the new capital to accelerate growth and build additional collaborative tools to improve the creation of physical products. The company is headquartered in Boston with development offices in Estonia. Total disclosed funding stands at around $14 million including prior rounds. GrabCAD operates an online community and marketplace for mechanical engineers to share CAD models and collaborate on engineering projects. Founded by Hardi Meybaum, the platform has attracted over 70,000 registered engineers and has surpassed one million downloads of CAD models, with an additional 200,000 downloads in the past three weeks. The company graduated from both Seedcamp and TechStars Boston. GrabCAD plans to use new capital to grow the GrabCAD.com marketplace and community and to expand its team, hiring 15 new people—mainly software engineers and product managers—in the Boston and Tallinn regions. Financially, it previously closed a $1.1 million seed round in June 2011 and has now completed a new funding round. GrabCAD operates a marketplace connecting mechanical engineers with manufacturers and product development companies and provides a free CAD model library. The platform is positioned like oDesk or eLance but focused specifically on mechanical engineering. Founded in 2009, the company is Boston-based with a development team in Estonia. Its community included over 7,500 mechanical engineers and had tripled in size in the past month. GrabCAD announced a $1.1M seed raise to fund expansion and hiring. Co-founder Hardi Meybaum said the company plans to grow to become the biggest mechanical engineering team in the world, and about half the GrabCAD team previously worked at Skype. GrabCAD is an open-source library for CAD engineers that lets users share 3D models to reduce duplicated design work. Founded by Hardi Meybaum and Indrek Narusk, the company says sharing models will allow engineers to spend more time creating unique products and components. GrabCAD plans to create a CAD engineering marketplace alongside the 3D model library and charge a brokerage fee for services ordered and completed through the site. The startup has already partly tested this concept by offering its own CAD services, including order-description and price-calculation forms and functionality. GrabCAD is a product of the Estonian Development Fund’s SeedBooster incubator and is set to debut in Beta in early August. It recently secured €256k in angel funding to support its development and growth.

Total raised

$14M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Oct 2012