Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were uninterested in using spreadsheets and screenshots to collaborate with teammates – in order that they founded a startup, Colab, to create a greater way.
The two met as students at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. As they accomplished their final internships before graduation (Andrews at Tesla, Keating at healthcare startup Reflexion Medical), they found that skilled engineering teams relied on cumbersome tools—namely spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks—to get collaborative work done.
“We've experienced firsthand the downsides of compiling critical design reviews by sending screenshots of designs backwards and forwards via email,” Keating told TechCrunch in an interview. “This led to frustratingly long review cycles, infinite administrative work and issues that fell through the cracks despite the most effective efforts of everyone involved.”
Being entrepreneurial types, Keating and Andrews decided to start out an organization they called Colab to develop the engineering collaboration suite they wanted to make use of themselves. The company's tools, which Keating says at the moment are utilized by teams at Ford, Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric, enable engineers to review design files, capture and track feedback, and document issues from a single dashboard.
“Colab allows multiple engineers and cross-functional stakeholders to review designs together and construct on one another’s feedback,” said Keating, now CEO of Colab. “Colab brings together design discussions previously lost in emails, spreadsheets and notebooks right into a platform that integrates back into enterprise systems like product lifecycle management, making it easier for engineers to deal with decision making with the suitable data available .”
Colab stores customer design data equivalent to 3D models and engineering drawings in its cloud. Built-in sharing tools allow engineers to send files to at least one or more suppliers while keeping chosen information equivalent to feedback and comments private.
AI is just not currently a significant a part of the Colab experience, but Keating says it can be in the following few months. Colab plans to make use of its growing customer data — anonymized and privacy-preserving, Keating guarantees — to construct AI models that help engineers make more “informed” decisions while automating routine and administrative work.
“Colab has a considerable amount of user-generated natural language data – design feedback – that is just not at all times captured in other enterprise systems,” Keating said. “This allows Colab to clarify and analyze why designs are created based on human insights. Colab understands not only how a design has modified, but additionally why it has modified.”
Meanwhile, Colab, which operates on a software-as-a-service model, appears to be doing well financially; Keating said sales have doubled within the last six months. He expects the discharge of paid add-ons this yr and next to extend profits even further.
al today announced that the corporate has raised $21 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Killick Capital and Pelorus VC.
“The $21 million, which brings Colab's total capital to $40 million, was raised specifically with the intention of using half of it to speed up the expansion of the prevailing go-to-market movement and the opposite half to take a position in larger bets equivalent to AI invest. ” He said. “Much of the investment will go towards expanding the team, having built a really efficient business over the previous few years.”
Colab plans to grow its workforce from 86 employees, most of whom are based in Newfoundland, Colab's headquarters, to about 120 employees by the tip of the yr as the corporate expands into Canada and the United States
