GrabCAD collaboration platform, at 350,000 members, is building the largest mechanical engineering team in the World
Founded in 2009 in Estonia by Hardi Meybaum and Indrek Narusk, GrabCAD, now headquartered in Boston, MA, is a leader in the Open Engineering movement with the primary objective of helping engineers get products to market faster by connecting people, content and technology.
GrabCAD received an initial round of seed funding of $1.1 million and a second round of $4.1 million, from a variety of venture capital companies including Matrix Partners, Atlas Ventures, uTest and Ahti Heinla formerly of Skype. The company is like oDesk or eLance but exists exclusively for mechanical engineers.
GrabCAD works on the same pedagogical philosophy as the “renaissance method” used by artists: a student learns as much from teaching as he learns from being taught; the website brings questions and experts together to flatten the learning curve. There are tutorials, experts with portfolios teeming with CAD projects, downloads and blogs, sharing and knowledge expansion, numerous CAD competitions and the largest free CAD library on the internet.
Designs from nuts and bolts to cars and engines, you name it, are uploaded to the site and like-minded people from manufacturing companies, engineering teams and design teams collaborate, share projects, learn tricks of the trade for all major CAD software and build stronger portfolios that demonstrate their growing expertise.
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