From the very early days of GrabCAD, I’ve had dreams of what it could be. It wasn’t “get to one million users” or “earn one million dollars.” It was always “wouldn’t it be cool if you could share CAD and have integrated tools all in one place?”
Most of all, I dreamed of freedom for engineers. Engineers, no matter where they are, should have their CAD editing software and collaboration tools available in one place on GrabCAD’s platform.
In 2009 this was a crazy dream, yet we still strived to achieve it. In 2010 we launched a Community that connected people to job opportunities and each other. Later that year when there were just 1,500 engineers on the GrabCAD platform I attended Autodesk University, and met Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk. Carl gave an inspirational speech about the Cloud and how it’s going to change everything. After his talk I approached him and pitched my idea. “We have 1,500 engineers finding jobs and collaborating. Wouldn't it be great if they could use CAD tools on the same platform?”
Since that statement, a lot has happened. The Cloud is becoming a standard platform for enterprise. The world has become much more open thanks to products like Github,Facebook and Twitter. Autodesk has built a lot of amazing technology that runs in the Cloud and on mobile. GrabCAD has grown to more than 700,000 members and brings collaboration to one place thanks to Workbench as well as our iOS and Android mobile applications.
As we mentioned in the release blog, we’re super excited to announce that, together with Autodesk, we’re taking it a step closer to the dream. Engineers can now CREATE inside GrabCAD using Autodesk tools (AutoCAD 360 for 2D creation and Autodesk Fusion360 for 3D creation), and the best part is that engineers don’t need to leave GrabCAD to accomplish that. Everything engineers need is in one place in the Cloud, and we’ll continue to add even more 3rd party CAD applications to GrabCAD Toolbox as they are built.
Thanks to all of the users for helping us make GrabCAD better every day.
Hardi, Founder and CEO of GrabCAD
P.S. In case you missed it, yesterday Carl and I had some fun playing around with the products. Here’s the video:
