After 3 Years And $64M In Seed Funding, Onshape Launches The Mother Of All Products

Behind every product is a product, almost invariably a computer-aided design (CAD) software package known as Solidworks. If you are a designer and want to draft a belt buckle for a new handbag, you have to use this software to carefully extrude the metal contours so that it is ready for manufacturing. Nearly every physical object we use – from our iPhones and headphones to our paper towel holders and toilet seat covers – started off as bits inside a computer.

Solidworks is now twenty years old though, and the package is starting to show its age. Collaboration is immensely tough, since it continues to use a file model not dissimilar from Microsoft Word. When you have product development teams with dozens if not hundreds of members, separating out parts of a product and tracking changes across sub-teams becomes an almost impossible problem to tackle.

That’s why a number of veterans of Solidworks, including its original founder Jon Hirschtick, have come together to completely reimagine how product design can happen in the age of the cloud. In the process, they have built an online software product that is nothing short of a technological marvel.

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Kiran Upadhyay

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