Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collaborate with teammates – so they started a startup, Colab, to create a better way.
The two met as undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. While completing their last internship before graduation (Andrews at Tesla, Keating at health startup Reflexion Medical), they noticed that professional engineering teams relied on clunky tools—specifically spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks—to get work done collaboratively.
“We experienced firsthand the downsides of consolidating critical design reviews by emailing screenshots of designs back and forth,” Keating told TechCrunch in an interview. “It led to frustratingly long review cycles, endless admin work, and problems slipping away despite everyone’s best efforts.”
Being entrepreneurs, Keating and Andrews decided to start a company, which they called Colab, to build the engineering collaboration suite they wanted to use themselves. The company’s tools, which Keating says are now used by teams at Ford, Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric, allow engineers to review design files, capture and track feedback, and document issues from a single dashboard control.
“Using Colab, multiple engineering and cross-functional stakeholders can review designs together and build off each other’s feedback,” said Keating, now CEO of Colab. “Colab brings together design discussions previously lost in email, spreadsheets and notebooks into a platform that integrates back into enterprise systems like product lifecycle management, making it easier for engineers to focus on making decisions with the right data at hand.”
Colab stores customer design data, such as 3D models and engineering drawings, in its cloud. Built-in sharing tools allow engineers to send files to one or more vendors while keeping selected information, such as comments and feedback, private.
AI isn’t currently a major part of the Colab experience, but Keating says it will be in the coming months. Colab plans to use its growing customer data — in an anonymized and privacy-preserving manner, Keating pledges — to build artificial intelligence models that help engineers make “more informed” decisions while automating routine tasks and labor Admin.
“Colab has a large amount of user-generated natural language data — design feedback — that isn’t always captured in other enterprise systems,” Keating said. “As a result, Colab can explain and analyze why designs evolve based on human insight. Colab not only understands how a design changed, but also why it changed.”
Meanwhile, Colab, which operates on a software-as-a-service model, appears to be doing just fine financially. Keating says revenue has doubled in the past six months. He expects paid add-ons to be released this year and next to boost profits even more.
Colab today announced that it has raised $21 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from Y Combinator, Killick Capital and Pelorus VC.
“The $21 million, which brings Colab’s total capital to $40 million, was raised specifically with the intention that half of it will accelerate the scaling of existing market traffic and the other half will be invested in bigger bets like artificial intelligence. ” he said. “Much of the investment will go towards expanding the team after building a very efficient business in recent years.”
Colab aims to grow its workforce of 86 people, most of whom are based in Newfoundland, Colab’s headquarters, to ~120 people by the end of the year as the company expands into Canada and the US
