London, United Kingdom, 14 April 2022 — Speckle, the open source platform for 3D Data, today announced that it has raised a $5.5M seed funding round led by Frontline Ventures and Matrix Partners to make the world of 3D data design more accessible and collaborative. Existing investors Foundamental and angel investors including the Co-founders of Sentry, Built Technologies, Plangrid, and executives from Snap and Stripe, also participated in the round. This brings Speckle’s total funding to $6.6M.

Speckle’s open source platform injects transparency, equity and efficiency into the 3D design process. The interoperable technology allows designers to transfer and exchange 3D data across software siloes in real time, bypassing restrictive file formats and messy naming schemes. Optimized for large 3D data sets, its scalable object graph storage system has supported the digital transformation of numerous leading organizations such as Arup and Royal HaskoningDHV.

From vacuum cleaners to submarines, buildings to virtual environments, gaming to entertainment, everything that’s built starts with 3D data design. However, industries continue to be bottlenecked by ancient software and manual workflows. The lives of architects, designers and engineers are needlessly painful when it comes to collaboration: the joy of working together is lost. The technical and political hurdles of sharing 3D data have shaped an adversarial environment that stifles creativity and cooperation. Speckle wants to open digital infrastructure and transform the future of the built environment and anything designed in 3D.

Speaking on the announcement, Speckle Co-Founder and CEO Dimitrie said “The incredible support we received in this round, coupled with Speckle’s impressive momentum, will accelerate our vision of democratizing the world of 3D data with open source tech. We can’t wait to open up a new digital era for how the world – and every object in it – is designed and built. It’s thrilling to see such a synergy between OSS and venture capital working together for the greater good! ”

Founded in 2020 by Dimitrie Stefanescu, a hybrid architect and programmer, and Matteo Cominetti, a hybrid software developer, Speckle began as an open source project. Conceived by Dimitrie during his Ph.D. research to improve digital design communication, the pair connected over Slack, while Matteo was working on similar technology for a leading architectural firm. Together they joined forces to streamline the technical design process for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry by removing vendor fragmentation, opaque file formats and slow proprietary solutions. Speckle’s popularity increased as the pandemic drove demand for digital remote collaboration solutions for 3D design.

“Software is finally eating the world of atoms and Speckle is at the forefront of bringing the power of code to the physical world. Dimitrie and Matteo are building the tools that will design the buildings, infrastructure and machinery of the modern world.” said Finn Murphy, Partner at Frontline Ventures. “It’s a multi-Trillion dollar opportunity to change the way we bridge the gap between software and the real world and we couldn’t be more excited to be on board.”

Plagued by inefficiency and fragmentation, the software landscape in many industries continues to be dominated by large software monopolies, controlling the market due to proprietary file formats and non-interoperable solutions. Speckle will use the additional funding to expand into other industry verticals, such as gaming and product design, and hire across community, engineering, and product roles. Additionally, Speckle will continue to build an open source community platform to enable everyone to communicate and engage with 3D data.

“Our world runs and depends on 3D design, yet the software remains dominated by closed non-interoperable solutions. Open-source, community-led platforms like Speckle break these shackles to open 3D design to all and empower those building our world across gaming, entertainment, architecture, transport, and elsewhere.” said Patric Hellermann, General Partner at Foundamental.

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About Speckle: Speckle is an open source cloud based solution and data platform for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. It provides honest interoperability, real time collaboration, data management, versioning and automation. Their mission is to empower AEC companies with open and accessible data. Founded in 2020, by Dimitrie Stefanescu and Matteo Cominetti.

About Frontline Ventures: Frontline Ventures (http://www.frontline.vc) is the venture firm for globally ambitious B2B businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. Frontline Seed strengthens and speeds up ideas at inception across Europe. FrontlineX is a go-to-market first, capital-second fund, for fast and frictionless US–EMEA expansion.

Today, Frontline has €225 ($275) million funds under management and has had numerous successful exits, including Pointy (acquired by Google), Logentries (acquired by Rapid7), and Orchestrate (acquired by CenturyLink).

About Foundamental: Foundamental (https://www.foundamental.com) is the largest global investor in ConstructionTech and architecture, engineering and design technology. Foundamental backs ambitious founders across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe from inception to IPO.

Foundamental currently manages ca. $150 million across their early-stage funds and is an early investor in several category leaders in construction-technology and design-technology, including Infra.Market, Tul, Welcome Homes, Mighty Buildings, Wiz and Rayon.