Manufacturing software company Tulip raises $ 100 million to give factory workers cloud-based tools

Natan Linder, co-founder and president of 3D Printing Unicorn Formlabs, founded Tulip seven years ago to give factory workers the same access to digital tools as office workers. As a sign of how far this market has come, Tulip has raised $ 100 million under the leadership of Insight Partners, Linder said. Forbes.

The new financing, which brings the total investment in Tulip to $ 153 million, values ​​the company close to $ 1 billion. “It’s close to a unicorn, it’s soon a unicorn,” Linder says. “You know my past, and you know we don’t chase a unicorn. Overpricing a business is not the right thing to do.

While digital transformation has easily taken hold of banking, sales and marketing, manufacturing, which accounts for nearly 15% of global GDP, has been the latest space to be transformed. But a number of new business-backed startups have worked to disrupt the space, as the pandemic has pushed the needs of factories and their workers to the fore.

Tulip’s software is designed to increase productivity for factory teams, much like workflow software from Salesforce and Atlassian has done for sales and engineering. It offers manufacturers a library of applications, with hundreds of templates that users can customize according to their own needs. To date, its customers have created more than 20,000 applications, Linder says, in areas such as production monitoring and workflow. Notably, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff invested in Tulip’s latest financing through his Time Ventures fund.

“When I saw Tulip, I was like ‘Sure’,” says Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, venture capital partner at NEA (who first invested in Tulip in 2017) and former president of Salesforce. com. “Here’s an industry that people haven’t thought about in terms of how to make it easier for people on the front lines to do their jobs. “

“I’m at a point where I’m not doing this for the extra money. I’m not going to get a bigger idea than this.

Linder, who is 43, was born in Israel and worked there as the general manager of Samsung’s electronics R&D center before moving to the United States. After moving to Boston, he worked as a designer for Rethink Robotics, the pioneering robotics company founded by Rodney Brooks that has since closed. Then, while at MIT Media Lab, he met Maxim Lobovsky and David Cranor, and they founded Formlabs in 2011. Linder remains president of Formlabs, which raised $ 150 million earlier this year, doubling its valuation. to $ 2 billion. (“I grew up one after another,” says Linder, who recently became a U.S. citizen. “Now you understand why I’m exhausted.”)

In 2014, Linder, who has a doctorate. of the Fluid Interfaces group of the MIT Media Lab, has partnered with Rony Kubat, holder of a doctorate. in IT at MIT, to launch Tulip Interfaces in the hope of solving what he saw as manufacturing problems. “We’re disrupting this old category, and for me it’s a very personal thing,” Linder says.

Tulip’s customers include dental manufacturer Dentsply, forklift manufacturer Terex, powerboat company Nautique and many others in more than 35 countries. These companies use its software to increase their output, improve their quality and improve their manufacturing processes. At Nautique, for example, Tulip offered increased production visibility in a complex manufacturing operation that involved 400 workers producing a dozen high-end custom powerboats on an assembly line every day. “Tulip is opening a long line of use cases that were perceived as too specific or too niche for traditional solutions,” notes Peter Sobiloff, CEO of Insight, who will join Tulip’s board of directors.

Since its launch, Tulip has helped customers track more than 140 million previously untracked production processes and has deployed its software to more than 300 work sites. As automation giants like Rockwell and Honeywell jump into software and giant software companies like Oracle and SAP jump into manufacturing, Linder argues that Tulip’s direction gives it an edge. “Thinking about software after the fact because you want to sell automation is wrong,” he says. “And selling software that doesn’t include the machine shop is a mistake. “

With the new funds, Tulip intends to expand its existing operations in Boston, Munich and Budapest, and open a new outpost in the Asia-Pacific region in early 2022. It also plans to invest in new product features to facilitate customer workflows. “I’m at a point where I’m not doing this for the extra money,” Linder says. “I’m not going to have a bigger idea than this. “