ELISE, a Germany-based connected engineering platform, has closed $14.8 million in a Series A financing round. The investment was led by Spark Capital with participation from BMW i Ventures, Cherry Ventures (invested in Medoma and Luminovo), UVC Partners, and Venture Stars.
Scaleup Plans On Cards
ELISE gained funding from Spark Capital for additional expansion. This allows the company to grow in new markets and expand to new application areas.
Maier, who is the co-founder and CEO of ELISE, explained that this new funding will help them get closer to being the low-code standard in engineering. A result of this funding is engineers being able to easily use ELISE’s visual programming language to quickly model and automate development processes, Maier said.
ELISE — short for Engineering Languages Integrated Solutions Engineering — provides language-agnostic engineering tools. Its creators claim that it’s already part of everyday life at companies like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Airbus. ELISE claims that users can save up to 90% of their engineering time when using its tools. Alex Finkelstein, a partner at Spark Capital, said that ELISE is the future of engineering that users can participate in today.
Benjamin Erhart, partner at UVC Partners, said, “The ELISE development platform has greatly decreased the time it takes to create new products. In addition, it has improved the quality of many components. We initially thought that ELISE wouldn’t have a significant impact on product development. However, we now realize that ELISE has changed the way products are developed in a dramatic way.”
Shortens Product Development Process
ELISE is the first open-source low-code platform for engineering. It was created in 2018 by Moritz Maier, Daniel Siegel and Sebastian Möller. The Connected Engineering platform is used to make engineering more accessible to teams and allows for digital, connected and automated product development.
Using this platform allows engineers to apply software development methods to hardware development. This helps automate repetitive and manual tasks, reducing the cost and pressure of innovation for companies that develop products.
By using algorithms, engineers can model product development steps in a digital workspace. This allows them to reuse work in new projects or variants drastically faster than before. Doing so results in a much more efficient use of their knowledge about the product.
ELISE’s customers include BMW Group, Hyundai Motor Group, MAN Truck & Bus and Toyota Gazoo Racing. Their team created a visual programming language to make it easier to design and execute their projects.
