Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners invests in ELISE
ELISE raises €3 million Seed Round to expand its Generative Engineering software
- ELISE develops a Generative Engineering software to automate product development processes
- Beta software users include leading OEMs and Tier1s in the automotive and aerospace industry such as BMW, MAN, Ariane Group and Brose
- Three million euros funding mark one of the largest Seed Rounds for deep-tech startups in Germany
Bremen, 04.11.19 – ELISE, a deep-tech startup developing a Generative Engineering software to automate the product development process raises €3 million in a seed financing round. “We are very excited about our seed round financing as it enables us to extend the functionality of our software”, says Dr. Moritz Maier, co-founder of ELISE. The round led by UVC Partners and Cherry Ventures, who invest alongside BMW iVentures and Venture Stars, is intended to speed-up product development of ELISE as well as its market entry.
ELISE aims to fundamentally change the process of how parts are designed. Today engineers usually start their product design journey based on sketches and 3D models, imagining how the product will look like at the end. Advances in additive manufacturing, however, nowadays allow for many more degrees of freedom and entirely new shapes and structures that the human brain can hardly come up with. ELISE, hence, instead starts with collecting the requirements of parts, such as its load cases, size, costs and subsequently helps engineers shape a product out of it. Along the way ELISE allows the engineer to include requirements from various other stakeholders, therefore skipping lengthy feedback loops that stretch product development timelines today.
„ELISE enables engineers to automate multiple time-consuming steps of the product design process.”, says Tobias Jahn, Principal at BMW iVentures. “We observed high-efficiency gains during the initial usage at the BMW Group and are convinced that such achievements are also possible at scale throughout the rest of the organization.” Co-founder Sebastian Möller resumes “The way we develop technical products tomorrow will be fundamentally different from today”.
In an exclusive beta phase with leading OEMs and Tier1s from the automotive and aerospace industry such as BMW, MAN, Ariane Group and Brose, ELISE has validated its software over the past 12 months and demonstrated huge value-add, saving engineers up to 90% of the time in designing products. “After several years of research and development, we have shown our proprietary software to selected partners for the first time and are overwhelmed by their feedback”, co-founder Daniel Siegel says. Benjamin Erhart, Partner with UVC concludes: „We are looking forward to supporting the team with our expertise in building B2B businesses and with leveraging our industry network. In the long run, we expect a broad adoption of ELISE – and we are in for accelerating this journey.“
About ELISE
ELISE was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute, a renowned German research center. ELISE develops software that empowers engineers to visually create end-to-end workflows for automated product development by adding established modeling and simulation tools to Generative Design.
For more info, visit ELISE at Formnext (booth C72) or elise.de
About UVC Partners:
Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners (UVC Partners) is a Munich- and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm that invests in technology-based startups in the areas of industrial technologies, enterprise software and mobility. The fund typically invests between € 0.5 – 3m initially and up to € 12m in total per company.
Portfolio companies benefit from the extensive investment and exit experience of the management team as well as from the close cooperation with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading innovation and business creation center. With over 180 employees and more than 100 industry partners, UnternehmerTUM can draw from many years of experience in establishing young companies. This cooperation enables UVC Partners to offer startups unique access to talent, industry customers, and other financial partners. The portfolio includes investments such as FlixBus, Carjump (Free2Move), KONUX, Blickfeld, 3YOURMIND and Vimcar.
