Looks like GrabCAD is putting their 4 million in funding to good use. They’ve been pushing out consistent updates on their website and Friday they announced that two new people had joined the growing roster at GrabCAD–Jon Stevenson (LinkedIn) and Grant Thomas-Lepore (LinkedIn) are now among the top tier of GrabCAD employees. Heard of them? Probably not. But their talents bring a lot of CAD and product development experience to the fledgling company. Some that is sure to turn some heads.
GrabCAD Ramps Up
Grant Thomas-Lepore will join as Product Manager. He has a background in software development with Gemvara, a custom jewelry and gemstone site, where he worked with automating visuals of 3D models for the website. He will provide insight into user interface and interaction for GrabCAD.
Jon Stevenson will join as a VP of Technology. Jon has a rich history in the CAD scene. From 1983 to 1993 he was with UG Solutions developing Unigraphics. You’ll know that compnay now as SiemensPLM and the software as NX. Not only was he responsible for the development of that engineering and design software, he was instrumental in building the Parasolid kernel that, to this day, powers NX, Solid Edge, SolidWorks and many other solid modeling programs. He knows a thing or two about software development–what works, what doesn’t work–and with his four year, and still current, position as SVP at Veracode, who delivers cloud-based security software, his involvement is very interesting indeed.
Some may argue that GrabCAD (‘a free CAD library’) hasn’t been a viable business model, that they don’t have a product and don’t provide a service. That outlook could change quickly. While GrabCAD doesn’t have any retail product or even a freemium platform for model storage or project development, the have 250,000+ members at this point in time, and a regular user base that would be ready to jump on a product if it looked good enough. These two just might be the people to help take them there. Can GrabCAD pull it off?
