Automating the Product Development Process - BMW i Ventures’ Investment in ELISE

BMW i Ventures is excited to announce an investment in ELISE - a German tech startup aiming to automate the product development process. We are thrilled to support the team around Moritz, Sebastian and Daniel in its €3m seed round alongside our friends at Cherry, UVC and Venture Stars.

Our excitement is based on the rapid development of the design engineering stack. With advances in simulation, generative design and additive manufacturing, we have seen a wide variety of emerging tools, often focused around specific use cases and mastering certain parts of the product development process to perfection. These have come from both large publicly listed incumbent companies, as well as smaller newly founded startups. The challenge that engineers often face when using such tools is how to combine them into a fluent experience that minimizes manual steps and maximizes time spent at efficient creative problem-solving work.

ELISE is developing a generative engineering software to solve this challenge. In less than a year and with limited resources the team has managed to onboard some of the largest manufacturing organizations in Germany as users of the ELISE product. The reason for these customers using ELISE is straightforward - efficiency gains.

Across various industries, engineers have managed to reduce up to a dozen engineering steps to a single one, merge numerous software tools into one interface and practically eliminate manual iterations. While we are announcing our investment, the team at ELISE is preparing its next-generation product enabling its customers to achieve even better performance.

We are delighted to welcome Moritz, Sebastian, Daniel and their team to the BiV portfolio. We are looking forward to supporting them in making product development automation available globally and further growing the company.