AGILEVC My idle thoughts on tech startups

January 4, 2012

Today one of our portfolio companies, GrabCAD, announced it’s Series A funding led by Matrix.  NextView originally invested in the company’s seed round in the spring of 2011 and we again participated in this latest round along with Atlas Venture.

I haven’t blogged about GrabCAD much here at AgileVC in the past, but we’re excited to be invesetors in the company.  Founders Hardi Meybaum and Indrek Narusk originally started building the company in their native Estonia before moving to Boston to join the hub of SaaS / CAD software companies located here.  It’s really been a pleasure for me to work with these guys.

In addition to compelling founders, we were drawn to the company by their vision for a professional community for mechanical engineers and designers.  LinkedIn is an amazing horizontal platform and continues to serve a broad range of professionals.  But some professional groups often have special characteristics that can best be served via a distinct community with SaaS products that extend deeper into their daily worklives.  You’ve seen this with companies like StackOverflow and Github in software engineering or Behance in visual design. GrabCAD is similarly changing the game for mechanical disciplines.

GrabCAD continues to grow like a weed with over 70,000 mechanical engineers who have downloaded CAD models from the community over 1.2 million times.  All of us at NextView are psyched to support the company into it’s next phases of growth along with the rest of the investor syndicate.