Turning over half a trillion U.S dollars worth of components annually - ranging from dental implants and artificial hip joints, to wind turbine gearboxes and battery casings in electric vehicles, this industry is the bedrock to our current quality of life. It’s also fundamental to the shift to net zero emissions. It sits at the heart of European industrial and defense competitiveness.
Today, we’re in the midst of a tectonic shift in how, where, and when our products are made. Driven by an accelerating shortage of manufacturing talent, an increased focus on efficiency due to machine commoditization and a shifting manufacturing base, alongside the race to net zero emissions, manufacturers are now looking to software and automation to bolster competitiveness.
Yet, today’s technology and processes used to get to that end product is not doing hardware teams justice.
Throughout the design and prototyping phase, engineers, procurement officers, designers and machine operators are forced to rely on ball-park estimates around what the optimal design and corresponding production cost for a certain part will be, juggling between static PDFs, slides and spreadsheets - all while going back and forth with the end customer around requirements. This is a $0.5 trillion industry making some of the most important products powering our modern society, having to rely on guesstimates.
Not only does this drive unnecessary cost and lead time, but it also makes you question what could be possible. If these highly skilled engineers can build jet engines and design life-saving medical devices with today’s processes, what can they achieve if we took out the guesswork?
Enter Encube: creating the product industrialization category
With mind-bending technology spanning physics, computational geometry and distributed computing at its core, Encube enables real-time CNC manufacturing simulations, collaborative 2D/3D workflows and AI-driven insights. In the end, this provides full insight into how design decisions impact manufacturability and cost, closing the loop between design intent and what ultimately is manufactured
With Encube, teams of engineers, designers, procurement, and clients can spend way less time prototyping, and get to an optimal design much faster. This changes the work mode and as accuracy increases, production line unpredictability and prototyping scrap disappears. A complete paradigm shift in a €0.5tr industry.
Encube is starting out with going really deep into industrialization of precision metal components using CNC machines. Over time, we believe Encube can become a critical platform for turning bits into atoms in other realms of manufacturing as well.
Founders moving at the speed of their own algorithms
We’re incredibly proud to have led Hugo’s and Johnny’s pre-seed round in 2022, as they now come out of stealth with a total of $23m in funding.
From the very first meeting we had with Hugo and Johnny, the ambition was clear - they wanted to make manufacturing a matter of pressing the “print” button. This was a wildly ambitious endeavor. Even though they were working on this alone at the time, they had on their own built software that made the heads spin of PhDs with a lifetime’s experience in the field, and managed to reach very challenging product development milestones within our few week timeframe of due diligence and deal processing.
Hugo Nordell (CEO) has a background as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and from Swedish industrial engineering company Sandvik, where he built up their Digital Transformation business area. He is attacking this industry with a unique combination of previous experiences and perspectives, having on the one hand seen how a machine shop works, while also leading Sandvik’s strategic software M&A.
Johnny Bigert (CTO) has a PhD in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology, and after kicking off his career making bond pricing software, he has spent time producing software and leading engineering teams at the likes of Skype, Microsoft and Klarna.
The co-founding team is a representation of a unique strength Sweden as a nation has in superb talent pools from both heavy industry and world-class tech companies. Together, they’ve managed to recruit a stellar team with backgrounds from Sandvik, Instaclustr, Klarna, Cognite, and Harvard University.
The mission the Encube team is on is far from trivial. With development challenges spanning mathematics, computational geometry and distributed computing, but what the team has achieved so far, and the speed at which the team is moving is eye-watering. The team has achieved fully autonomous manufacturing in a live test setting, with their engine outperforming experts with 10+ years of experience. At the same time, they’ve been able to partner up with top blue-chip OEMs and regional tier 1 suppliers.
We’re so excited to be a small part of this journey together with Hugo, Johnny and the rest of the team. Driving change in this industry is critical to making the machining industry sustainable, to drive European and Western competitiveness, and to unlock human creativity in industrial production. If you’re interested in working with the Encube team, or are building something in industrial software, we’d love to hear from you!
