Hard tech startups are generating a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing group of firms creating digital tools whose primary goal is to make hard tech development faster, more streamlined, and, well, much more like software development.
Based in California Summary is the latest startup to emerge from this team. Although the company comes out of hiding on Monday, it has actually been around for three years. But the team kept a very low profile despite raising a total of $5.6 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Thiel Capital.
The startup has developed a software platform that might completely change the way complex hardware is built. The platform is designed to accompany the entire product lifecycle, comprehensively supporting tasks corresponding to systems engineering, systems modeling, requirements management, technical documentation generation, design reviews and more.
The platform consists of assorted “modules” corresponding to requirements management and the CAD viewer, all of which communicate with each other and express changes made throughout the project.
“[Rollup is] a product that requires homework, not homework,” founder and CEO Collin Mickels explained in a recent interview. “Many engineering collaboration programs are mostly treated as homework by engineers. They come in, upload the file, commit it, and then leave.
Rollup, nonetheless, should be left on the side of the engineer’s screen as an all-day companion to his work. Mickels, who worked briefly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Blue Origin and Varda Space Industries before founding Rollup, said the establishment is characterised by communication inefficiencies, corresponding to meetings, emails and Slack messages, or entire workstations , which aim to reduce friction between different fields corresponding to mechanics, electrical, regulations and so on.
“Engineers basically spend 10, 20, 30% of their time doing non-engineering work,” he said.
The platform’s goal is to condense iteration cycles on complex hardware and ultimately help firms, especially those in the earliest stages, get to market faster with less technical risk.
Rollup generates revenue, and just about all of its customers are early-stage firms, from small satellite manufacturers to robotics firms. The startup’s goal is to attract more mature firms to its customer base, increase the variety of integrations with other tools and introduce more functionalities to the platform.