When GRABCAD 100 million dollars for prostitution, micro-network push online 3D collaborative design

3D printing is known as one of the eight major technologies that affect the future. With 3D printers, any imagination can be printed into reality. 3D Printing and digital manufacturing has a wide range of applications that can change the world in many ways. Around 3D printing services are also in the ascendant, the global 3D Print services to provide 3D hubs has just been 4.5 million dollars a round of financing; Last week, the four-year-old CAD designer Community Grabcad was bought by the 3D print giant Stratasys at $100 million. There are a number of domestic enterprises to do 3D printing related projects Entrepreneurial team, for example, today want to introduce the micro-net is a bit like the Chinese version of the Grabcad.

The reason is that micro-nets are a bit like the Chinese version of the Grabcad, mainly because they launched the first half of this year online 3D collaborative design innovation Platform PIM (Product innovation Management), can be regarded as a Chinese version of the workbench. PIM is for a wide range of industrial design scenarios: an industrial designer undertakes a design task, may need to and front-end market demand personnel, back-end hand proofing personnel communication, but also need to communicate with project management personnel, if this design requirements from the outside, but also may be with a series of personnel communication These communications do not currently have a professional tool to load and manage, the basic mode is through QQ, RTX, BBS, and even evernote such tools to achieve, the data is extremely dispersed, management is very confusing. PIM wants to change this chaotic communication state, based on the web implementation of 3D design model browsing, based on 3D model to achieve text annotation communication, so that all the project participants in a design document communication, greatly facilitate the design synergy.

Industrial design software is a more traditional field. As you can see, in most software has been gradually moving towards the cloud, mobile today, industrial design software is still stuck in the field of pure desktop software, basically in the form of packaged software, even if the world leader in industrial design software such as Autodesk, and so on, the attempt in the Internet and mobile Internet is extremely limited. On the one hand, from the technical point of view, the Internet of industrial design software is very high technical difficulty; On the other hand, the Internet business model of industrial design software is not mature enough. Even in the vertical community area of industrial design software, there are only a few very traditional BBS in China, which lacks interesting and valuable vertical communities. See this opportunity, at the end of 2012, Yau four people formed a small team, to the parent company in the Dragon (domestic industrial design software manufacturers) to apply for internal entrepreneurship, at the same time to get a million dollar value domain vx.com.

Yau, co-founder of the Micro-net, revealed to 36 Krypton that the July 18, 2013 micro-net was back online, removed from the original 3D Print Service module, and they began to focus on building a professional 3D model sharing platform. At present, in the absence of pay promotion, the daily average visitor in more than 20,000, PV more than 100,000, 3D model works have been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, the number of works is almost to 30,000 (according to a single CAD file of more than 200,000), registered designers reached 80,000.

PIM is a micro-network in March this year officially launched new products, based on web 3D technology, for engineers and their team to provide online collaborative design, product innovation communication services. Through PIM's common management of product innovation design process, engineers, marketers, managers, suppliers and even customers can quickly preview and comment on the 3D model of innovative products online, manage the version history of the design documents, and communicate online. PIM is still part of the Beta 1.0 phase, and there is no large-scale promotion, mainly by attracting the micro-online senior designer users to participate in the free trial, to help improve the product.

In fact, over the past few years, we have been not very clear GRABCAD profit model, until they launched the workbench. A bit like the GRABCAD profit model, the micro-net is a reservoir of services and benefits for millions of designers, and PIM service professionals and businesses are fishing nets and future PIM will be a profitable point. Before the domestic do industrial design and mechanical design team complained about workbench fees, servers in foreign pain points, they are willing to the PIM such services to pay.

Foreign Grabcad on the line in 2010, the June 2011 received 1.1 million U.S. dollars in seed money, 4 million dollars in early 2012 to obtain a round of financing, the GRABCAD has attracted more than 70,000 registered engineers around the world, the CAD model has been downloaded more than million. In October of the same year, Grabcad again received a whopping $8 million trillion round of financing, the total financing amount of about 14 million U.S. dollars, at this time Grabcad registered users are close to 300,000, according to the Wired revealed that this has accounted for the global mechanical Engineers One-tenth. By the time of last week's acquisition, the registered user had been over 1.5 million, and the designer had shared as many as 520,000 CAD files. It has been about two years since the financing of the B-round, and Grabcad has not received a new round of investment. Compared to almost every six months before the rhythm of a round of VCs, which seems to herald the capital market is not too optimistic about the prospects of GRABCAD and workbench and money.

Will the micro-network and PIM have similar problems in the future? Yau that PIM's profit model is clear, and Evernote is the same, but the service group is more professional. Do this for a while there is no profit timeline plan, do a good product, so that the design team to use the comfortable, will be the main consideration now. Workbench Although the profit model is clear, but the upfront investment must be quite a lot, Grabcad can't wait until it can be changed the day, early found a good club sold is also understandable, there is no profit on the hands of examples also have a lot. And Grabcad is acquired, it is likely to be in Workbench will increase investment, backed Stratasys,workbench development speed should be faster.