Trace.Space Secures Seed Funding to Boost AI-Driven Product Design

In the world of modern product engineering, creating super accurate digital simulations is a big deal. It lets engineers whip up prototypes and get a feel for how materials will perform in the real world. Usually, you'd see big names like IBM and Dassault with their legacy software doing the heavy lifting. But now, startups are stepping up their game, and they're using generative AI to shake things up.

Take Trace.Space, for instance, a fresh face from Riga, Latvia. This AI-powered platform is all about helping engineers craft industrial products. With Western manufacturing feeling the heat from its speedy Asian rivals, there's a mad dash to build these platforms and speed up product development. We've seen new players like Luminary and Dessia Technologies jump into the fray, both using AI to automate engineering processes.

Trace.Space zeroes in on the development of electric and autonomous vehicles, satellites, robots, semiconductors, and medical devices. While traditional solutions often stick to "on premise" setups, Trace.Space goes the modern route with cloud computing. It's also great for letting manufacturers and suppliers work together on shared product requirements, cutting down on response times.

Janis Vavere, the co-founder and CEO of Trace.Space, chatted with TechCrunch about it: “Every company out there building complex, regulated products in automotive, medical, aerospace, and more, is dealing with the headache of these products getting more and more complicated to design. The old tools and processes are just not cutting it anymore. IBM’s tools, which were designed back in the late '80s, are still around. They're a desktop client that you need to install on every computer.”

After working on Jama Software, a newer design platform, Vavere saw the need for something more advanced: “It’s the perfect time to mix modern software architectures and UIs with AI, and use them in these industries. Companies are hungry for something better right now.”

And Trace.Space isn't just slapping an AI label on things, Vavere explained: “We use AI models like Llama and some deterministic AI libraries, plus bits of OpenAI’s LLM.”

Before Trace.Space, Vavere was a sales leader at Jama Software and spent two years leading sales at Lokalise, a translation management software company. His co-founder Mikus Krams worked in operations at Lokalise and the software development startup Chili Piper. The third co-founder, Karlis Broders, had experience implementing Jama and Polarion in large-scale projects.

Trace.Space has just nabbed $4 million in seed funding, with Cherry Ventures leading the charge. They were joined by Riga-based Outlast Fund, and earlier investors Nebular, Fiedler, and Change Ventures.