Berlin

May 12, 2023

SPREAD, an engineering intelligence startup for complex mechatronic products, today announced the closing of their €14.6 million Series A funding round, led by HV Capital with participation from existing investors Cavalry Ventures. The round also attracted angel investors Dylan Field, Figma Co-Founder & CEO, the founders of logistics unicorn Sennder, and Summit Partners founder Walter Kortschak.

SPREAD will use the fresh capital to scale their early successes outside of automotive to new markets. The Berlin-based startup will develop the platform's capabilities and expand the reach of the Engineering Intelligence Network. SPREAD's technology makes sense of complex products like cars, aircraft, and heavy machines to democratize engineering knowledge.

Robert Göbel, SPREAD Managing Director who co-founded the company in 2019 with Philipp Noll, stated: "SPREAD's mission is to make product information easily accessible & actionable for everybody. We saw that engineers spend 70% of their time manually searching for product information. They need this information to work on their piece of the puzzle and make sure it fits into the bigger picture. If you consider the huge effort that goes into manually building this contextual understanding, it is remarkable that engineers can make such innovative and complex products work."

To address this, SPREAD built a medium for engineering intelligence – an information layer that connects and standardizes all sources of product data, to help the thousands of people working on a product quickly and intuitively get the information they need.

Philipp Noll, Co-Founder and Managing Director at SPREAD, explained: "Our Engineering Intelligence Network is the key to understand how a product functions as a whole. Engineers benefit massively from this bigger picture. We give them their time back, so they can solve complex challenges faster than before."

Manufacturers of complex mechatronic products spend billions to prevent delayed product launches, failures, material waste, and recalls. This results from a fragmented tool landscape that causes essential engineering information to be siloed or difficult to access. SPREAD's Engineering Intelligence Network combines all separate information sources on a single software solution.

Philipp Noll added: "We connect existing tools and systems instead of replacing them. This is a huge advantage for engineering teams creating complex products across different departments and domains because they can integrate our technology much faster and quickly achieve time to value. Therefore, every insight they uncover has a huge potential when scaled to the whole product line."

For such companies, SPREAD has already developed use cases to tackle various specific engineering challenges – from development to manufacturing, and maintenance. In one real-life example from R&D, SPREAD identified that engineers could reduce the weight of the vehicle's wiring harness by 1 kg without affecting safety or functionality. Considering roughly 80 million vehicles produced in 2021, scaling this potential means saving 2.73 billion kg of CO2 per year.

"SPREAD's Engineering Intelligence Network is leading the shift in how products are designed, produced, and repaired. All German automakers are already benefitting from SPREAD, and the pull from international players across industries is stunning to observe," explains Felix Klühr, Partner at HV Capital.

Electronics and software complexity is growing so quickly that conventional approaches like adding more time, budget, and engineering capacity are not sufficient. The tools used today – digital twins, PLM systems, AML, PDM etc – are not able to capture the complexity of the system as a whole.

SPREAD's intelligent algorithms understand the interplay of the mechanics, electronics, and software domains. Combining this with information about a product's requirements, functions, logic, and physics gives engineers unprecedented insights about a product that can scale along with its complexity. SPREAD combines existing data across engineering domains to create unprecedented insights that drive magnitudes of improvement across the whole product lifecycle. To learn more about SPREAD, check out the video below: