Shapr3D

Our 2024 Euroscape: AI Eating #Software is now live! Key findings include: ➡️ #AI is driving value creation in the tech public markets and the recovery of venture funding, with an increase of 27% over 2023 ➡️ Two thirds of AI private funding has gone into the top six companies in each region ➡️ Three #GenAI leagues are emerging: Tech Titans, AI Majors and AI Challengers Who will win the AI race? Read the report to find out more and see our list of the top 100 AI and #cloud companies to watch across Europe and Israel. #SaaS

Had a great demo by Peter Kocs with Shapr3D Demonstrating their 3D CAD system integrated with the Apple Vision headset. He later let me try on a headset and I could see CAD edits in realtime on a 3D model placed in space virtually. Really cool, really fun! #cad #applevision #tradeshow #mdm

We need a CAD component provider to become the AWS of industrial software. The closest today is Siemens (Parasolid and DCM), but I think there is a huge opportunity to make it more successful. Why? Because CAD kernels are infrastructure, and they should be treated as such. The first kernel provider to realize this will dominate the market in the next decade. In this post, I’ll use Parasolid as an example, but the same applies to all high-end proprietary kernels. 👇 Infrastructure is typically: •Expensive, hard, and time-consuming to build. •Very hard or impossible to replace without significant service interruptions. •Provides a platform for a range of different services built on top of them (which means that replacing them comes at the cost of replacing services depending on them). Parasolid checks all these boxes, and by changing a few things it could ignite a new industrial software renaissance: 1. Make it more accessible Today, starting a project based on Parasolid is not like starting a project on AWS. You need to negotiate a contract, explain your use case (which is usually unclear at the beginning of a new project), and go through their sales team—before you've written a single line of code. This introduces enormous friction for launching a new project. In an ideal world, I should be able to pull a GitHub repository, start hacking a sample project, and have a working application an hour later. 2. Make it easier Parasolid is fantastic, but it’s very low-level. To build an application, you need to write tens of thousands of lines of code just to get Parasolid off the ground. From memory management to graphics, there’s a ton of code that offers no competitive advantage, yet every company has to write it. This could be solved by making Parasolid more accessible and letting the community build this layer as open-source. 3. Make the documentation publicly available The documentation should serve as a marketing tool for Parasolid. By making it accessible to the developer community, it could inspire enthusiastic engineers to build exciting new projects on top of Parasolid. 4. Build a community Since the Parasolid ecosystem is currently closed, it’s impossible to build a vibrant community around it. A community would make it easier to build new applications on Parasolid, by providing support and developing a shared application layer. 5. Open-source as much as possible This might sound scary or insane to some, but… I genuinely believe the value of Parasolid isn’t in its algorithms, but in its role as the industry-standard infrastructure, creating a shared language between industrial applications. Making as much of it open-source as possible would engage developers further and increase trust in the platform. To be clear: Parasolid should still charge for licenses, and forking should not be allowed to avoid diverging from standardization. This would increase trust and attract more customers, potentially even some of the other incumbents!