GrabCAD is just not stopping. They’ve hired two high level product people from SolidWorks and completed another round of funding. This time closing $8.15 Million to bring their total influx of funds north of $13 Million. We caught up with Hardi Meybaum and Jon Stevenson to find out more.

GrabCAD Rampage

Since their last round of funding in January, GrabCAD has hired 10 new people. Jon and Grant were part of that, bringing in deep product dev experience, and now they’ve added two more.

“We are opening a Cambridge UK development office and the first people to join are Dan Dignam (Chief Architect from SolidWorks) and Stuart Reid (Development Director of Interoperability from SolidWorks),” Hardi said. Both were at Shape data while Jon Stevenson, current VP of Technology at GrabCAD, was in charge of marketing and developing the Parasolid modeling kernel… Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

Hardi continued, “We have also raised another round of financing – 8.15M dollars from Charles River Ventures (investor in Twitter, Yammer, Zendesk) and David Sacks (founder and CEO of Yammer).” The new funds will go toward building out the 3D viewer experience, the new GrabCAD Teams (beta) collaboration tool and expanding the Estonian dev team, which is chock full of developers that brought success to Skype.

When I asked about a revenue model, future product or a ‘Pro’ option, Jon Stevenson responded that their focus is on the growth of the community and providing them with the collaboration tools needed. Seems to be working for them as the GrabCAD community nears 300,000 people and GrabCAD Teams becomes increasingly used in production environments.

Continuing their growth, they’ll either need to get more funding, be acquired or introduce a premium product. I’ll leave it to you consider which it could be, but I certainly think some big company eyes are watching/mouths are watering.

Author

Josh is founder and editor at SolidSmack.com, founder at Aimsift Inc., and co-founder of EvD Media. He is involved in engineering, design, visualization, the technology making it happen, and the content developed around it. He is a SolidWorks Certified Professional and excels at falling awkwardly.