Bremen, Germany-based ELISE, a connected engineering platform, announced today that it has secured $14.8M (approximately €14.9M) in a Series A round of funding.
The latest funding round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners, and Venture Stars.
“This new investment will allow us to make significant progress towards our goal of becoming the low-code standard in engineering. The ease of use of our visual programming language enables engineers to model and automate development processes in the shortest possible time,” explains Maier, co-founder, and CEO of ELISE.
“With our open platform, we enable engineers to transfer the agile and efficient methods of software development to hardware development. This automates manual and repetitive tasks and enables companies to manage the growing complexity of product development in the face of increasing cost and innovation pressure,” he adds.
The announcement comes three years after raising €3M in a Seed round from UVC Partners, Cherry Ventures, Venture Stars, and BMWi Ventures in November 2019.
ELISE: What you need to know
Founded in 2018 by Dr. Moritz Maier, Sebastian Möller, and Daniel Siegel, ELISE develops and sells software that helps engineers design product developments more efficiently.
The company is on a mission to make engineering more accessible for teams with a low code platform. Without programming knowledge, algorithms can be created in the ELISE that automates product development processes from CAD to FE.
The founding team developed a solution for their projects to overcome the challenges of manual and repetitive development tasks. Consequently, the inquiries about their engineering services converted to paying customers leveraging the software to solve business challenges.
Currently, the company works with various companies, including BMW Group, Hyundai Motor Group, MAN Truck & Bus, and Toyota Gazoo Racing.
The German company has provided engineering services at the Alfred Wegener Institute for over ten years. They have designed a visual programming language for more efficient design and execution of their projects.
Investor
Based out of Boston, Spark Capital is a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage startups in consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors.
“ELISE has made the idea of connected engineering part of everyday life at renowned companies including BMW, Mercedes-Benz Group, and Airbus. When ELISE customers achieve up to 90 percent time savings in development processes, it’s much more than a proof of concept. It is the future of engineering that ELISE customers can already participate in today,” says Alex Finkelstein, general partner at Spark Capital.
UVC Partners is a German early-stage venture capital firm that invests in European B2B startups in enterprise software, industrial technologies, and mobility. The fund typically invests between €0.5M – €10M initially and up to €30M in total per company.
Benjamin Erhart, Partner at UVC Partners, adds, “ELISE has already fundamentally changed how products are developed. We didn’t think at the beginning that rapid iteration, reusing work, and easy integration of existing tools would have such a huge impact on product development: The improvements that ELISE has been able to achieve with the first well-known customers, both in terms of development time and component performance, are incredible. We are convinced that sooner or later, the ELISE platform will be the go-to tool for engineers in their day-to-day business.”
Berlin-based Cherry Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm with experience building fast-scaling companies such as Zalando and Spotify. It has previously invested in the seed stage of over 90 European companies, including FlixBus, Auto1 Group, Flaschenpost, Infarm, Rows, Forto, SellerX, Juni, and Flink. The firm has operations in London and Stockholm, but invests across Europe.
