Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more.
When you think about aerospace companies, chances are the first names that come to mind are giant companies like Airbus and Boeing. But these major industrial companies collaborate with a galaxy of small and large suppliers working on components, parts and specialized processes. And the same is true in automotive, medical device manufacturers and other industries.
These companies — the top 1% of manufacturers — are already using PLM software developed by Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC or Siemens. But the long tail of industrial companies often don’t have the right tools to manage their operations and optimize their workflows.
“The PLM market is one in which there are four major players who account for 90% of the market … These are very big companies that initially had CAD [computer-aided design] software and then developed PLM around twenty years ago for very big companies, such as Airbus and PSA, which have design offices employing several thousand people and very complex requirements,” Aletiq co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Ricard told TechCrunch.
“As a result, these are high-performance solutions, but they are very complex to use, and very heavy and time-consuming to deploy. And most of these solutions are on premise,” he added.
As you may have guessed, Aletiq takes a completely different approach. The company is entirely focused on product lifecycle management and following the SaaS (software-as-a-service) playbook. It serves large SMEs and mid-market industrial companies.
“We have a solution that’s very intuitive and easy to use, which means that it can be massively adopted by our customers. And we’ve got a solution that’s quick to deploy, in just a few months, so they can get a return on investment after one quarter,” Ricard said.
Aletiq acts as the single source of truth for product data, CAD files, specification sheets, information on quality requirements and more. It integrates with the enterprise tools that these companies are already using, including CAD and ERP software.
In addition to improving internal workflows, Aletiq can also be used as a supply chain traceability tool or as a tool to co-design some components with other companies. An Aletiq customer “will be able to communicate with its partners by sharing data with its customers, but also with its suppliers, who will have a dedicated space on the platform, a kind of supplier portal for sharing,” Ricard said.
Since the company’s creation in 2019, the Aletiq team has spent quite a bit of time developing its platform before signing its first customers. But there are now 5,000 people using Aletiq as part of their work across 10 different countries.
Most customers are mid-market industrial companies, but Aletiq has also signed some big names, such as Safran, Hutchinson and Lisi Group.
In addition to Point Nine, Entropy Industrial and AngelInvest have also invested in the startup. Several business angels have participated as well, such as Carsten Thoma (Celonis), Emmanuel Martin Chave (BlaBlaCar), Markus Ament (Taulia) and Stéphane Albernhe (Archery Strategy Consulting).
Romain Dillet is a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch. He has written over 3,000 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, privacy, security, fintech, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With twelve years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In fact, his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover N26, Revolut and DigitalOcean. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.