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Some of my earliest memories were sitting on the floor in my grandfather's study looking up at the tall wooden bookshelves lined with seemingly endless rows of textbooks.
A civil engineer by profession, the books were from his university and early career days in the 1940s, covering everything from physics and mathematics to the design of reinforced concrete.
Pictured below, Grandpa Lenny sits today with one of these books, the 1924 edition of Ketchum’s Structural Engineers’ Handbook. The book functions as part theoretical handbook to structural engineering, part an extensive register of pre-calculated inputs for construction designs. With each construction, there will be hundreds of individual joins, shelves, and other sub-structures to the overall design of buildings, bridges, walls, and other constructs. The inputs found in long registers of such books determine the quantity of materials required given the forces at work in each configuration.
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Quite astonishingly, these books are still a core tool in the structural engineer's toolkit. Whereas the likes of Onshape, Aconex and Procore have brought software to most elements of the design and construction process, structural engineers are still largely using a combination of pen and paper, do-it-yourself excel templates, and thick textbooks from the 1920s to perform vital calculations. The advanced among today's engineers utilise black-box add-ins for MS Word and Excel that require painstaking data input, or they leverage clunky software solutions built with Windows-95 looking interfaces. Where calculations must be performed to a region's adopted engineering standards, the options available to engineers comprise a cottage industry of underinvested localised solutions.
Enter ClearCalcs. The product brings structural engineering into the world we know today of slick SaaS solutions tailor-made for a business' needs. With cloud hosting, a drag and drop interface and step-by-step calculation breakdowns, the software provides engineers a solution to perform multiple simultaneous calculations across a design that are easily auditable, available anywhere and simple to report. In chatting to customers and getting to know the product, it was quite clear that the team had developed something that easily passes Peter Thiel's often quoted benchmark of providing a 10x better experience compared to existing solutions.
In developing the low-code calculation builder that underpins the ClearCalcs product, the team are also playing into an area we are excited by at EVP. For the better part of the last decade, low code platforms have received due hype in allowing non-technical developers to prototype software tools per lean startup methodology. A less talked about, but equally valuable benefit, is where we see low-code solutions forming the core of a software product, enabling rapid configuration of a solution for different customers and use cases. With more use cases comes a larger target market that warrants the investment required for optimal product development.
We have seen this value come to light several times across the EVP portfolio where flexible, configurable products powered by low-code platforms displace constrained, narrow incumbent solutions. For Fusion Sport as an example, its low code platform architecture allows it to cater to professional rugby players, ballerinas and special forces soldiers with the same product. For ClearCalcs, its low-code approach means it can scale its calculations across different materials, geographies and engineering disciplines. Where competitive solutions are clunky, rigid and geography specific, ClearCalcs is tackling the market with a sophisticated global product refined to the needs of each engineer.
The ClearCalcs team is strongly placed to tackle the global market of structural engineers accounting for more than 4 million potential users hungry for new software. The product attracts some thousands of new users each month with minimal marketing spend, even before its library of calculations across materials and geographies is fully built out. Adding new markets and acquisition channels to the existing rapid growth trajectory has the business on an exciting path even before expanding into other engineering fields accounting for a further 20 million potential users.
Having gotten to know founders Chris and Steve over a number of years, we've been continually impressed by their best-in-class ability to tap into the minds of their engineering customers, their grit in tackling a significant problem space and their ability to attract top talent to their mission. Chris brings a strong marketing background and a deep understanding of engineering workflows with many years of professional experience and family history in the engineering industry. Steve brings 15 years of software development excellence with experience across several different businesses including as co-founder of Stile Education.
We are thrilled to lead ClearCalcs latest funding round and feel privileged that Chris and Steve have welcomed us into their journey.
But most importantly...Grandpa Lenny is excited to put away his 1924 edition and get his ClearCalcs demo scheduled.
Some of my earliest memories were sitting on the floor in my grandfather's study looking up at the tall wooden bookshelves lined with seemingly endless rows of textbooks.
A civil engineer by profession, the books were from his university and early career days in the 1940s, covering everything from physics and mathematics to the design of reinforced concrete.
Pictured below, Grandpa Lenny sits today with one of these books, the 1924 edition of Ketchum’s Structural Engineers’ Handbook. The book functions as part theoretical handbook to structural engineering, part an extensive register of pre-calculated inputs for construction designs. With each construction, there will be hundreds of individual joins, shelves, and other sub-structures to the overall design of buildings, bridges, walls, and other constructs. The inputs found in long registers of such books determine the quantity of materials required given the forces at work in each configuration.
Quite astonishingly, these books are still a core tool in the structural engineer's toolkit. Whereas the likes of Onshape, Aconex and Procore have brought software to most elements of the design and construction process, structural engineers are still largely using a combination of pen and paper, do-it-yourself excel templates, and thick textbooks from the 1920s to perform vital calculations. The advanced among today's engineers utilise black-box add-ins for MS Word and Excel that require painstaking data input, or they leverage clunky software solutions built with Windows-95 looking interfaces. Where calculations must be performed to a region's adopted engineering standards, the options available to engineers comprise a cottage industry of underinvested localised solutions.
Enter ClearCalcs. The product brings structural engineering into the world we know today of slick SaaS solutions tailor-made for a business' needs. With cloud hosting, a drag and drop interface and step-by-step calculation breakdowns, the software provides engineers a solution to perform multiple simultaneous calculations across a design that are easily auditable, available anywhere and simple to report. In chatting to customers and getting to know the product, it was quite clear that the team had developed something that easily passes Peter Thiel's often quoted benchmark of providing a 10x better experience compared to existing solutions.
In developing the low-code calculation builder that underpins the ClearCalcs product, the team are also playing into an area we are excited by at EVP. For the better part of the last decade, low code platforms have received due hype in allowing non-technical developers to prototype software tools per lean startup methodology. A less talked about, but equally valuable benefit, is where we see low-code solutions forming the core of a software product, enabling rapid configuration of a solution for different customers and use cases. With more use cases comes a larger target market that warrants the investment required for optimal product development.
We have seen this value come to light several times across the EVP portfolio where flexible, configurable products powered by low-code platforms displace constrained, narrow incumbent solutions. For Fusion Sport as an example, its low code platform architecture allows it to cater to professional rugby players, ballerinas and special forces soldiers with the same product. For ClearCalcs, its low-code approach means it can scale its calculations across different materials, geographies and engineering disciplines. Where competitive solutions are clunky, rigid and geography specific, ClearCalcs is tackling the market with a sophisticated global product refined to the needs of each engineer.
The ClearCalcs team is strongly placed to tackle the global market of structural engineers accounting for more than 4 million potential users hungry for new software. The product attracts some thousands of new users each month with minimal marketing spend, even before its library of calculations across materials and geographies is fully built out. Adding new markets and acquisition channels to the existing rapid growth trajectory has the business on an exciting path even before expanding into other engineering fields accounting for a further 20 million potential users.
Having gotten to know founders Chris and Steve over a number of years, we've been continually impressed by their best-in-class ability to tap into the minds of their engineering customers, their grit in tackling a significant problem space and their ability to attract top talent to their mission. Chris brings a strong marketing background and a deep understanding of engineering workflows with many years of professional experience and family history in the engineering industry. Steve brings 15 years of software development excellence with experience across several different businesses including as co-founder of Stile Education.
We are thrilled to lead ClearCalcs latest funding round and feel privileged that Chris and Steve have welcomed us into their journey.
But most importantly...Grandpa Lenny is excited to put away his 1924 edition and get his ClearCalcs demo scheduled.