CoLab Software, a company building collaboration solutions for mechanical engineering and hardware development teams, announced a fully subscribed Series B round with $21 million funding round. And Insight Partners led the round, with participation from existing major investors, including Y Combinator, Killick Capital, and Pelorus VC.
Over the last two years, CoLab has grown revenue nearly 10x while partnering with engineering teams at leading manufacturing organizations, including Ford, Schaeffler, and Komatsu. By using CoLab’s Design Engagement System to review engineering files and capture and track feedback, these teams have accelerated design cycles while increasing design quality and product quality.
This funding round will be used to reach new customers and accelerate technology development, including artificial intelligence. CoLab will also invest in expanding relationships with existing customers, an effort that has yielded successful results so far with 158% net revenue retention (NRR) in the last 12 months.
CoLab will also utilize the funding to expand its team, adding 30-40 new roles at headquarters in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and remotely across Canada and the United States. This will include three key executive hires: a vice president of Sales, a vice president of People, and a vice president of Customer Success.
CoLab’s platform streamlines manual, multistep processes for sharing designs, documenting feedback, and tracking issues. By centralizing reviews and feedback in a single platform, teams generate referenceable design histories for every part as a byproduct of doing their work. And CoLab captures data on how engineering teams evolve their designs, generating quantitative insights. This same data can be used to train AI models. For customers that opt-in, CoLab’s ReviewAI will help engineers make more informed decisions and automate routine tasks and administrative work.
CoLab plans to reveal new solutions and give an early look at its product roadmap at the company’s first user conference, The Design Engagement Summit, which will take place in St. John’s on August 27-29, 2024. And the agenda also includes comprehensive talks from engineering practitioners at companies like Schaeffler, Autoneum, and iRobot. CoLab’s Series B funding round at a time when interest in manufacturing, hardware engineering, and supply chain technology is on the rise.
KEY QUOTES:
“As products become more complex, companies hire global teams of specialized experts to analyze tradeoffs and evolve designs. But the tools these teams have to review designs, collaborate, and make decisions haven’t evolved to handle the complexity. The result is a huge administrative burden for engineers and unacceptable risk of issues slipping through the cracks.”
- Co-Founder and CEO Adam Keating
“By applying machine learning and generative AI, we can enhance and extend the value of CoLab’s core platform for mechanical engineering teams. We’re excited to accelerate delivery of these solutions, as a result of this funding round.”
- Jeremy Andrews, Co-Founder and CTO
“Manufacturing organizations are adopting Cloud based software faster than ever before. There is significant opportunity for vertical SaaS to improve outcomes, increase efficiencies and replace manual processes. Insight has made a number of exciting investments in manufacturing related SaaS, including this recent investment in CoLab.”
- Josh Fredberg, Managing Director at Insight Partners and a member of CoLab’s Board of Directors
