nTop raised $40M to drive the future of engineering

Led by Insight Partners our Series C will allow us to expand our capabilities and adoption worldwide.

In 2019, we launched nTop Platform to empower engineers to design revolutionary products. Today, our software is used at hundreds of engineering companies by thousands of engineers on their most advanced projects in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and consumer industries.

Our latest round of funding, $40M in Series C announced today, helps us make the most advanced engineering software accessible to all engineers. 

Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm based in our hometown of New York City led the round joined by Grant Verstandig & our existing venture partners Root, Canaan, DCVC, & Haystack. I met Jeff Lieberman at Insight Partners two years ago & the more we have gotten to know each other the more it was clear that Insight Partners would help take nTop to the next level.

Josh Fredberg of Insight Partners will be joining our Board of Directors -- he joins us with decades of experience at companies like ANSYS and PTC. Our board now includes two industry experts: Josh and Carl Bass, the former CEO of Autodesk.

Unlocking the promise of advanced manufacturing

A revolution is currently taking place in advanced engineering. Rapidly maturing digital manufacturing technologies, like additive manufacturing, provide obvious advantages to delivering high-performance products at unprecedented speed—from COVID-19 test swabs to the latest jet engines—but the tools for designing these products create a bottleneck where engineers are forced to fight with their software and compromise on designs.

Nearly everything you see around you was designed in a handful of CAD systems whose underlying technology has remained fundamentally unchanged for 40 years. Unfortunately, this technology has not and cannot scale gracefully to solve the hard engineering problems arising today because of the increased part complexity associated with new manufacturing technologies.

Enter nTop Platform

nTop Platform is our contribution to the engineering world. We’re relentlessly pursuing our goal to build the most powerful engineering software, eliminate bottlenecks in traditional modeling technology, and empower engineers to design transformative products. 

We intentionally make very few assumptions about your processes. Instead, we give you the right tools that deliver the necessary precision and control at the right level of abstraction. This way you can adapt nTop Platform to your engineering workflows — not the other way around.

nTop Platform is built on three major pillars (as explained in more detail in Generative Design That You Control)

• Fast, unbreakable geometry: nTop Platform is based on an implicit modeling engine, a technology we pioneered for mechanical engineering applications that overcomes the inherent limitations of traditional modeling approaches. It’s extremely reliable, lightning-fast, and can easily handle geometries with high complexity while keeping the file size of intricate designs to only a few kilobytes.
• Field-Driven Design: nTop fields give you precise control over spatial variations of shape, allowing you to produce a much wider spectrum of designs. Analysis and test results often take the form of fields, so you can use these to model in nTop Platform. So, for example, you might use structural analysis results to create thicker walls in regions of high stress.
• Reusable workflows: nTop Platform is the first engineering design software where built-in and user-created capabilities seamlessly merge in reusable workflows. Multiple stakeholders can collaborate to build scalable systems that encapsulate engineering knowledge, manufacturing methodologies, and in-house IP. These systems can then be deployed and reused by engineering teams throughout the organization: redeploying expert knowledge when and where it is needed.

What’s next?

Within the next 5 years, innovative engineering companies will be producing around 30% of all parts using additive or other advanced manufacturing processes. (example: TEMPEST.) We expect that nTop Platform will be used to empower the design of the majority of these parts.

Engineers from the aerospace and medical industries are currently leading the adoption and deployment of advanced manufacturing, so they were the first to realize the need of the powerful design tools offered by nTop Platform. We’re also seeing rapid adoption of our tools in the automotive, consumer, and manufacturing tooling industries.

Do we want to end up replacing traditional CAD? No, that’s not our purpose. Rather, we expect engineers to use nTop Platform alongside existing systems, to solve new and hard problems that traditional CAD was never built for. Overcoming those challenges will enable engineers to innovate faster, create new solutions to pressing global issues, and foster new markets. The types of problems that nTop Platform solves are more & more becoming a daily occurrence for all engineers. Closing this new round of funding will help make the most advanced engineering software accessible to all.