Let’s be honest, engineering is the powerhouse of innovation, and engineers have developed some of the most life-altering products and solutions known to humanity today. What aqueducts did to transform agriculture, so did windmills to revolutionize energy production. From an idea inside an engineer’s mind, to blueprint, to finished product — and sometimes — to results that will have a massive impact on the lives and well-being of humans.

Today, we stand in front of some of the hardest engineering challenges ever. Decarbonization, re-industrialization and digitalization call for shorter timelines and a need for a new and more streamlined and iterative design process. To combat these challenges, we need to produce new solutions faster that will have more complex use cases and dependencies, all of which require a new approach to engineering.

However, the process from idea to finished product has never been a smooth ride. Traditional engineering methods are slow, inefficient, and capital-intensive processes. The engineering of complex physical products such as EVs, spacecrafts, or power plants usually means that teams of engineers must carry a single engineering design through a multi-year process.

It’s painful. There’s failure. Processes fall apart. And as much as this is an intrinsic part of an engineer’s career, it’s also a result of old engineering tools that have failed to keep up with the increasing complexity of modern products. It hampers the pace of much needed innovation, and engineers are forced to spend vast amounts of time working on products that will never see the light of day.

This is something that the founding team at Generative Engineering knows well. They successfully carried British EV maker Arrival all the way to public listing, contributed to many of the company’s core innovations, and together have some of the most impressive CVs we’ve seen in this industry. But they have also seen firsthand that it takes a lot of time, money and people to design and develop new products and that — unfortunately — failure is common. Witnessing and experiencing these challenges prompted them to think differently and build a powerful integration framework that solves these problems.

Joe Griston, Laurence Cook, Nick Arini and Nick Boultbee have developed a unique platform that allows engineers to create and run models that generate and test thousands of different engineering designs at the same time. Instead of working with a single design, the platform lets the engineer assess an optimal design and provides the flexibility needed for them to become radically more efficient — just what’s needed in a world where we urgently need products and solutions to help solve some of humanity’s most critical issues. Agriculture needs new solutions as soils deplete. Climate change forces us to reimagine energy supply. Large-scale emissions reductions require new mobility solutions.

Engineers have the solutions — they just don’t have enough time on their hands.

Generative Engineering have created a github co-pilot for design engineering. We’re so excited to have met the founding team, and their ambitions are impressive. The impact their product can have on the entire engineering industry is hard to believe, even if you have an engineering background. And if you don’t — trust me on this one.

Generative Engineering’s platform has the potential to shave off years of product development timelines across multiple industries, all whilst saving huge amounts of money by smarter design and better performance. The team have created something fit for the long-term — a product suite/data platform for generative design that removes the problem of siloed data.

It’s our pleasure to join such an exciting and admirable team of founders as they continue their journey to 10x engineers’ efficiency. We’re just happy to be on board.

I will end with a riddle from our IC deck: