Valispace: the smart collaboration platform for engineers

The smart collaboration platform for engineers

Engineers collaborate inside Valispace in real time, iterate design options, keep track of technical changes, analyse and visualize their data. This provides traceability of discussions and decisions throughout the entire life cycle of a project.

Valispace integrates easily with many common engineering tools already in use, and provides an API allowing for advanced automation, scripting and optimization. Valispace is fully complementary to the CAD, PLM and ERP systems that many companies already have.

Why you need more than a spreadsheet for your engineering data

Streamlining the engineering process

Valispace aims to radically streamline the engineering process of hardware projects. This will enable small teams to design highly complex systems fast and cheap, and big teams to build things which seem like magic to us today.

Software engineering already went through this revolution. While in the 70s you would need hundreds or thousands of engineers to create the simplest programs, small and lean teams nowadays are able to create amazing and scalable software at a rapid pace.

This revolution was driven by Collaboration Tools, which made teamwork truly feasible and are the backbone for practically every small and big software project today, and by Open Source, which allowed the creation of reusable building blocks and tools, of which millions of software engineers benefit daily in their open or closed projects.

Today hardware engineering works exactly in the opposite way. What seems unimaginable in the software engineering world – like emailing source code, instead of managing it in one central place – is common practice for collaboration in complex hardware engineering.

Outside the limited use of CAD in developing hardware systems, there is little use of common representation of engineering data, to allow collaboration or reuse.

At Valispace we believe that there is a hardware revolution to come: harnessing the power of low costs for electronics, the availability of methods such as 3D printing as well as ever-growing connectivity, we expect the hardware world to make a huge leap forward in the coming years.

Valispace is aiming at becoming the backbone of this revolution.

 

Airbus uses Valispace to create technology roadmaps

Of all the software-based environments we tested, we were most impressed by Valispace.“ Olivier de Weck, Senior Vice President and Head of Technology Planning at Airbus

Technology roadmapping is typically done based on experience and intuition. It can be made far more meaningful by taking evidence-based decisions.

Key to generating meaningful insights is the ability to map connections between technologies, for which Valispace has proven to be an ideal tool.

These technology insights do not only help making R&D funding decisions, but also provide a key tool for monitoring technological progress and to react to unforeseen breakthroughs or delays.

Upcoming GOMspace makes fast design iterations with Valispace

It’s the new tool for New Space and has improved our engineering process by cutting the Excel time." Matteo Emanuelli, Systems Engineer at GOMspace

Customizing and combining existing designs is key to setting up new projects quickly and write proposals in an efficient way.

GOMspace has set up a catalogue of known systems and subsystems inside Valispace, through which they are able to drag and drop these into new products.

Valispace automatically generates the correct technical budgets, avoiding countless hours of copy-paste work in Excel.

Valispace team

In 2016, Marco Witzmann, Louise Lindblad and Simon Vanden Bussche, engineers from the aerospace industry, decided that it was time to change an industry that, although it’s building complex hardware to improve our future, is still using software from the past.

They formed the German start-up company Valispace, now with offices in Bremen and Lisbon. 

In 2017 they got Airbus as a customer and in 2018 they got €1 million seed investment from HTGF.

10th ESA Investment Forum 
Valispace will participate to the 10th ESA Investment Forum 31 January 2019.

The ESA Investment Forum is an ESA space solutions event organized by ESA Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) Hessen and Baden-Württemberg in partnership with with High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR) 

The aim is to foster investments in start-ups operating in the space domain as well as within related application domains, downstream as well as upstream. It provides a platform for networking as well as matchmaking between innovative space start-ups and investors.

ESA BICs - World's largest ecosystem for space-related entrepreneurship

The ESA Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) Hessen and Baden-Württemberg is part of the ESA space solutions network of 20 ESA BICs throughout Europe.

The centres are operated under ESA’s Technology Transfer and Business Incubation Programme Office (TTPO) with the European network of Technology Transfer Brokers. Together they offer access to all aspects of space-related innovation, technology and intellectual properties and is a gateway to ESA and European space research and developments.

The 20 ESA BICs in 17 European countries – Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and UK – are forming the largest ecosystem in the world for space-related entrepreneurship. The 21^th centre is soon to open in Northern Germany and more centres are already under preparation.

Over 700 start-ups have been fostered and another near 180 new start-ups are taken in yearly at the ESA BICs to be supported under the two-years business development boosting programme.