Colab’s collaborative tools for engineers generate $21 million in new funding

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collaborate with their teammates. So they launched a startup, Colab, to create a better solution.

The two met as undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. As they completed their final internships before graduating (Andrews at Tesla, Keating at Reflexion Medical, a healthcare startup), they noticed that professional engineering teams relied on tools impractical, namely spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations, to carry out collaborative work.

“We personally experienced the downsides of gathering critical design reviews by emailing screenshots of designs,” Keating told TechCrunch in an interview. “This has led to frustrating and lengthy review cycles, endless administrative work, and issues falling through the cracks, despite everyone’s best efforts. »

As entrepreneurs, Keating and Andrews decided to start a company, which they called Colab, to create the collaborative mechanical engineering suite that they themselves would like to use. The company’s tools, which Keating said are now used by teams at Ford, Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric, allow engineers to review design files, capture and track feedback and document issues from a single dashboard.

“With Colab, multiple engineers and cross-functional stakeholders can review designs together and build on each other’s feedback,” said Keating, now CEO of Colab. “Colab brings together design discussions previously lost in emails, spreadsheets and notebooks into a platform that integrates with business systems like product lifecycle management, enabling engineers to more easily focus on decision-making with the right data available. »

Colab stores customer design data, such as 3D models and technical drawings, in its cloud. Built-in sharing tools allow engineers to send files to one or more vendors while keeping certain information, such as feedback and comments, private.

AI is not currently a major part of the Colab experience, but Keating says it will be in the coming months. Colab plans to use its growing customer data – in an anonymized, privacy-friendly way, Keating pledges – to create AI models that help engineers make “more informed” decisions while automating design tasks. routine and administrative work.

“Colab has a large volume of user-generated natural language data (design feedback) that is not always captured in other enterprise systems,” Keating said. “As a result, Colab can explain and analyze why designs evolve based on human insight. Colab understands not only how a design has changed, but also why it has changed.

Meanwhile, Colab, which operates on a software-as-a-service model, appears to be doing very well financially; Keating says revenue has doubled in the last six months. He expects paid add-ons to be released this year and next to boost profits even further.

Colab announced today that it 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 specifically raised with the aim of half of it being used to accelerate the scale-up of the existing go-to-market movement and the other half to be invested in bigger bets like AI. ” he said. “A large part of the investment will be dedicated to expanding the team after building a very efficient business over the last few years.”

Colab aims to grow its workforce of 86 people, most of whom are based in Newfoundland, Colab’s headquarters, to about 120 people by the end of the year, as the company expands across the country. Canada and the United States.