Generative Engineering, a London-based software company on a mission to vastly improve the overall efficiency of physical engineering, has successfully closed a €4 million pre-seed round led by EQT Ventures with participation from Join Capital.
The engineering of complex physical products, such as those within the automotive and aerospace industries, is a slow, inefficient and capital-intensive process. Engineering tools have not kept up with the increasing complexity of modern products, and today, engineers working on product development typically take a single design through a multi-year, highly manual process. This usually involves collaboration issues, information loss, mistakes, rework and often failure.
To solve some of the world’s most pressing issues, including a looming climate crisis, we need remodelled, effective, and more reliable engineering processes. And more efficient engineers.
Generative Engineering offers a unique platform that allows engineers to create and run models that generate and test thousands of different engineering designs, all within a fraction of the time these processes take today. This parallel engineering, pioneered by the company, has the potential to radically decrease product development time, allowing innovative solutions within energy, decarbonization, agriculture, mobility and more to reach the market much faster. This platform forms the centerpiece of the modern engineering software stack.
The founding team, Joe Griston, Nick Arini, Laurence Cook and Nick Boultbee have backgrounds ranging from PhD-level computational engineering at MIT to product management at Google. The team experienced first-hand the complexities of general engineering by building the British electric vehicle manufacturer, Arrival, and contributing to many of its core innovations and the subsequent listing of the company, the second largest in UK history. At this point, the team moved on to establish Generative Engineering, having understood the impact enhanced engineering processes could have on the industry, and the world.
Joe Griston, co-founder and co-CEO, said: “Engineers of real-world products are the unsung heroes of the modern world, they bring solutions to many of the planet’s critical issues, but time is of the essence. We need a faster way to make engineering more cost-effective, efficient and productive. Our platform will supercharge engineers, giving them the tools to exponentially increase their impact by generating and showcasing thousands of different tested designs in a fraction of the time.”
Founded in 2021, Generative Engineering’s platform works throughout the engineering process, from designing individual parts to developing complex systems, across concept engineering to systems integration and cost engineering. When thousands of designs can be generated and tested in parallel, engineering teams can make better and more informed decisions. In addition, the company has developed a powerful code-first integration framework that allows engineers to plug in existing tools and use them alongside out-of-the-box integrations. All this means that engineers can become drastically more efficient whilst maximizing every investment in their existing software tools.
The market for engineering software is growing rapidly and is currently valued at approximately $30 billion. However, Generative Engineering’s platform has potential to bring substantial cost-savings for the entire engineering industry – a market worth several hundred billion USD.
Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures, commented: “The founding team have all witnessed first hand the pain points of engineering. They have seen that it takes time, money and people to design new innovative products – and unfortunately – that failure is common. Generative Engineering’s platform can shave off years of development timelines and bring enormous cost-savings through a smarter design process.”
Sebastian von Ribbentrop, Partner at JOIN Capital, added: “From our first meeting we have been very impressed by the successful development of Generative Engineering’s platform at such an early stage, and are fortunate to be funding such an extraordinary team.”
