I am devastated, DEVASTED I tell… yet also quite hopeful. A bitter-sweet day for all. The most advanced web-based 3D modeling site and, really, the only great hope for 3D creation on the web, at the moment, has announced they are closing shop to pursue a new venture. In place of models created by users, the Tinkercad homepage now shows the closure announcement and the dates the door will close. Pretty clever of the good chaps at Tinkercad, because this makes it the perfect environment to announce their new venture and how Tinkercad will live on.
The closing of Tinkercad
The closure of Tinkercad does indeed feel all sorts of strange, especially in light of our interview with Kai Backman late last year, hearing the passion about developing Tinkercad, the interest in what users are making, how people are using it and the plans for the future of Tinkercad. Of course, that was six months ago. The last day the site will be open in any capacity is June 31st, 2014, so you have some time to download your files before the gate finally shuts. For posterity, here is the Tinkercad announcement:
Announcing Airstone and the closure of Tinkercad
When Mikko and I founded our company in 2010, our core idea was to leverage a web browser UI and high performance computing to disrupt computer-aided design and engineering. Our vision was that a software platform created specifically for supercomputers would let us build some very exciting applications. In early 2011 we launched Tinkercad on this platform. It was the first cloud-based 3D CAD ever built and has grown to be a successful product in its category.
In parallel with Tinkercad, we continued development of the core platform. In October 2012, we launched a scripting interface for one of the key components, the Gen6 geometry modeling kernel. And finally, in late 2012, we had several major breakthroughs in our research work on the core platform that opened up application possibilities we had never imagined possible.
In response to these breakthroughs, I’m excited to announce an updated roadmap. There are two major parts to the new roadmap: 1) we are working on an innovative new simulation environment called Airstone, and 2) we will be discontinuing development of Tinkercad. You can read more about Airstone in the official announcement.
To help the engineering team focus on Airstone, I have made the decision to pull the team off Tinkercad. Aside from emergency maintenance, there will be no further feature development work and we will eventually turn the site off.
The Tinkercad shutdown timeline will be:
- Effective immediately we have closed sign-ups for new users
- April 30 2013 – All free accounts will be changed to read only
- August 31 2013 – All academic accounts will be changed to read only
- December 31 2013 – All paid accounts will be changed to read only
- June 31 2014 – Read only access for all users will be discontinued
There is an FAQ with additional details that we will keep updating as questions arise.
It was a hard decision for the team to stop working on Tinkercad. However, I can speak for everyone when I say we are very excited about the potential of Airstone. If you are interested in a sneak peak at the future of computational engineering, visit our website at http://airstonelabs.com or shoot us an email at team@airstonelabs.com.
Yours sincerely,
Kai Backman
Founder & CEO
Announcing Airstone
With the announcement of Tinkercad closing, Airstone was revealed, along with the announcement of Series A investment. Airstone is an “interactive simulation environment powered by a supercomputer”. According to the Airstone announcement, “The fundamental technologies of Airstone – the Gen6 geometric modeling kernel and the custom cluster management system – were key components of the very popular consumer modeling package Tinkercad.” They disrupted product design and the idea of what a 3D modeling tool could be with Tinkercad, now they’re set to shake it up even more with a tool to disrupt the entire product design and engineering process. With this Tinkercad lives on and, in the midst of our sadness of seeing Tinkercad go, we’re excited to see what Airstone will bring.
From Kai via Twitter:
@solidsmack @tinkercad The core of Tinkercad will live on in Airstone. Sadly the team is too small to chase two hares.
— Kai Backman (@kaibackman) March 26, 2013
Announcing Airstone, an interactive simulation environment powered by a supercomputer
March 26th, 2013 — Airstone Labs is a San Francisco-based startup developing a groundbreaking new simulation product aimed at the product design and engineering markets. The company is inviting early customers to contact us, to influence product direction and reserve their spot on the 2013 supercomputing-capacity roadmap.
The Airstone simulation environment turns batch simulation into a real-time environment where the user can interactively test different product designs. The tool is based on production-tested infrastructure, and is backed by a Series A investment from leading venture capital investors.
Airstone is an integrated software and hardware service, built from the ground up to utilize massive high performance supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of CPU cores. This tight integration allows users to run complex multi-physics simulations in real-time, thereby disrupting their current product design and engineering processes by massively increasing their productivity.
The company is built on a solid foundation of two years of live production experience. The fundamental technologies of Airstone – the Gen6 geometric modeling kernel and the custom cluster management system – were key components of the very popular consumer modeling package Tinkercad. The Gen6 is the only geometric modeling kernel that scales to thousands of CPU cores, while the bespoke cluster management system enables quick scaling of simulation codes to large numbers of computation nodes.
The company is also pleased to announce that it has closed a Series A financing round led by True Ventures, with new investments from Borealis Ventures and Lifeline Ventures. “When they founded Tinkercad and set out to build the web’s leading cloud-based CAD tool, Kai and Mikko had to first build a supercomputer-scale modeling kernel. In the process of following our close friend Steve Blank’s customer development process, the team at Airstone Labs identified a far more exciting market for their groundbreaking computing platform: real-time simulation and computational engineering. We are thrilled to support such an incredibly talented team as they rush full bore into this space with tremendous technology already live. Our adventure with Airstone is just beginning, and all of us at True could not be more excited.“ says Jon Callaghan of True Ventures, who will be joining the Airstone Board of Directors.
Airstone Labs is actively hiring Engineers at its San Francisco office
