Aletiq raised a 6 million euro funding round led by Point 9 several months ago (approximately $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup today announced its establishment round. ALETIQ develops product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more.
When you think about aerospace companies, it's a chance to think of giants like Airbus and Boeing. However, these major industrial companies work with galaxies of small and large suppliers working on components, parts and specialized processes. The same can also be said for automobiles, medical device manufacturers and other industries.
These companies (the top 1% of manufacturers) already use PLM software developed by Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, or Siemens. However, the long tail of industrial enterprises often does not have the right tools to manage operations and optimize workflows.
“The PLM market has four major players that make up 90% of the market. These are very large companies that initially had CAD. [computer-aided design] Geoffrey Ricard, co-founder and CEO of Aletiq, told TechCrunch, developed software about 20 years ago for very large companies like Airbus and PSA, which employ thousands of people and employ extremely complex requirements, and then developed PLM.
“The result is that these are high performance solutions, but they are extremely complicated to use, and most of these solutions are based on premise,” he added.
Image credit: aletiq
As you can imagine, Aletiq takes a completely different approach. The company is fully focused on product lifecycle management and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) playbook. We serve large small and medium-sized businesses and medium-sized industrial companies.
“We have a very intuitive and easy to use solution, meaning customers can adopt a lot.
ALETIQ acts as a single source of truth for product data, CAD files, specification sheets, and information about quality requirements. It integrates with enterprise tools already used by these companies, such as CAD and ERP software.
In addition to improving internal workflows, ALETIQ can be used as a supply chain traceability tool or as a tool for co-designing some components with other companies. ALETIQ customers “can communicate with partners by sharing data with customers, but it is also a type of supplier portal for sharing, a sharing supplier that has dedicated space on the platform,” Ricard said.
Since the company's creation in 2019, the ALETIQ team has spent quite a bit of time developing the platform before signing its first customer. However, there are currently 5,000 people using Aletiq as part of their work in 10 countries.
Most of their customers are middle market industrial companies, but Aletiq has also signed several celebrities, including Safran, Hutchinson and Lisi Group.
In addition to Point 9, Entropy Industrial and Angeline Best are also investing in startups. Several business angels are also involved, including Carsten Thoma (Celonis), Emmanuel Martin Chave (Blabracar), Markus Ament (Taulia), and Stéphane Albernhe (Archery Strategy Consulting).