Elise
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Generative engineering start-up Elise has raised €3 million in a seed fund round led by BMW i Ventures.
BMW i Ventures, who has previously invested in Desktop Metal, Carbon and Xometry, was joined by Cherry, UVC and Venture Stars in raising the capital, which will be harnessed to accelerate Elise's product development and commercialisation.
Elise has been founded on the back of more than ten years of research at the Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Here, Elise's eventual founders focused on natural lightweight construction principles and the formulation of complex organic structures before developing a software platform designed to help automate product development. The resulting platform combines modelling and simulation tools with generative design capabilities and, through a beta programme, has been in the hands of a number of manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers including BMW, Ariane Group and Brose for the last year.
The idea behind Elise’s software is to design parts with its requirements, and the requirements of the user and other stakeholders, considered from the get-go. With Elise, users will input cost and material data, as well as manufacturing constraints, before the software connects to generative cells, which provide design templates based on existing patterns and bionic design principles, and then evaluative cells, which take into account support generation, printing direction, and multiphysics simulations. Out the other side of this process is an optimised design which can then be 3D printed.
Elise
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After the beta programme, all users of the software said it demonstrated value-add with some engineers achieving up to 90% time-savings in the design of products.
“Elise enables engineers to automate multiple time-consuming steps of the product design process,” commented Tobias Jahn, Principal at BMW i Ventures. “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 organisation.”
“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,” offered Elise co-founder Daniel Siegel.
“We are very excited about our seed round financing as it enables us to extend the functionality of our software,” added Dr Moritz Maier, another of Elise’s co-founders.
Elise will be exhibiting at the upcoming Formnext show in Hall 11.0 Stand C72 between November 19-22.
