Bullish on the CAE Market: Tech Soft 3D Acquires Visual Kinematics

Engineering software toolkit provider Tech Soft 3D has acquired California-based Visual Kinematics (VKI). VKI develops a suite of software development kits (SDKs) called DevTools for computer aided engineering (CAE) applications.

VKI is Tech Soft 3D’s second acquisition in as many months. In October, Tech Soft announced it had acquired Norway-based Ceetron AS. Like VKI, Ceetron develops SDKs for the CAE market.

The two acquisitions represent a focused push into the CAE market. Tech Soft 3D CEO Ron Fritz told engineering.com that his company sees great potential in CAE. “Simulation is really everywhere now,” he said.

Pushing into CAE

Tech Soft 3D has been around since 1996, and in that time it has only made a handful of acquisitions. One was in 2010, when Tech Soft 3D acquired France-based TTF, the originator of 3D PDF, from parent company Adobe (rescuing the standard, Fritz once wrote). Then, in 2013, Tech Soft acquired tetra4D, a company which built end-user 3D PDF products.

That was it for a while, and Tech Soft 3D was content with organic growth for the better part of decade.

Then in February 2020, Tech Soft 3D found a benefactor. Battery Ventures, a technology investment firm, gave the company “a significant investment” to “fuel growth.”

Fueled up, Tech Soft 3D knew exactly where it wanted to grow. The company’s HOOPS suite of SDKs provide a broad range of graphics and data exchange components that are found in over 500 engineering applications. Of those, Fritz told us, around 50 are CAE specific.

“These two acquisitions allow us to go much deeper in those markets with much more purpose-built solutions for CAE,” Fritz said, adding “it’s a market we’re quite bullish on.”

Absorbing Ceetron and VKI

Ceetron and VKI were obvious choices for Tech Soft 3D’s expansion into the CAE market. For one thing, the three providers of engineering SDKs were “adjacent to one another for a very long time,” according to Fritz. Several applications use a mixture of the different providers’ components.

There’s also a significant overlap in clientele. While Tech Soft 3D won’t be gaining a large number of new customers with the acquisitions, the company hopes to deepen its existing relationships. Among these relationships are major CAD and CAE vendors including Autodesk, Ansys, Dassault Systèmes, Hexagon, Siemens, and more.

Read more at ENGINEERING.com