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The round was led by Space Capital, with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Felicis, V1.VC and technologists.Ī multitude of software tools are used through the lifecycle of hardware product development, from more generalized tools to the very specialized.
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Violet Labs just closed a $4 million seed round to accelerate product development as Hoag and Caitlin race to market later this year. The duo is now eight months deep into building the company to develop that tool. “Here” is quitting their jobs to work on the Violet platform full-time. “At Kuiper is where I met Caitlin and we both really bonded over that frustration. “We’re really still doing things the exact same way,” she said. When she returned to aerospace at Amazon, after years mostly working on self-driving cars, she said she was shocked at how little the tool set had developed. That led her into a career working for some of the biggest companies in the world: Google, Waymo, Lyft and most recently Amazon, for its broadband satellite initiative Project Kuiper. Hoag, who has a background in astronautical engineering, cut her teeth building a tool called Spider to automate the satellite design process. The company is also developing a no-code user interface that can act as an all-in-one toolkit for hardware engineers. The Violet platform would function similarly, generating API requests and collating the data into a single powerful database. Hoag likened the product to Zapier, which uses APIs to talk to different tools. To solve this problem, Violet Labs is developing a cloud-based platform that can act as a single source of truth, collecting the data from all the tools and making them easily accessible across teams. It’s a problem, common across the industry, that she and her co-founder Caitlin Curtis say leads to major inefficiencies. She wasn’t referring to the sophistication of the tools, but the way in which the hardware production toolset is balkanized across both teams and tasks.
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“You’d be shocked at how archaic the tools are,” Lucy Hoag, co-founder of Violet Labs, said. Then imagine being unable to easily share your data to different teams, having to use clunky user interfaces and relying on a single person manually inputting data in an Excel spreadsheet to bottom-line your project. Imagine building some of the most sophisticated hardware-driven technologies in the world - spacecraft, drones or autonomous vehicles.