“Hardtech” is the latest buzz in venture capital, but all hardtech industries are still about machines that work well, parts that ship on time, and that are built to very precise requirements. relies on software infrastructure to ensure
Stell is a two-year-old software startup focused on this latter part of the engineering ecosystem. The company has developed requirements management tools that allow teams to track, validate, and validate requirements for complex projects.
“Requirements management is a very process-heavy and unwieldy workflow, and all the current tools are really broken in terms of user interface and are not usable by the majority of team members in a company,” says Stell. Mallory McLemore, co-founder and CEO of , explained in a recent interview. .
What she should know is that McLemore is a trained engineer who has worked for major companies such as Airbus and Raytheon, as well as manufacturing startup Hadrian. She founded her Stell in 2022 with her venture capital and Anwen, an expert with experience in launching space startups.
The two met at Harvard Business School and shared the view that complex engineering is overburdened with paperwork and poor workflows. They were imagining something different. It's a tool that's really useful, easy to use, reduces paperwork, and that engineers actually want to use.
McLemore and Wen raised $3.1 million in pre-seed funding last January to execute on this vision. This includes an entire ecosystem where people can communicate, track and trace requirements all the way to customers.
Now, more investors are backing Stell's vision. Last month, the company closed a $4 million seed round led by Long Journey Ventures and Cyan & Scott Banister, with participation from Third Prime, Wischoff Ventures, Urban Innovation Fund, Forward Deployed VC, Fulcrum Venture Group and select groups. . About angel investors.
Stell initially rolled out tools to digitize specifications and technical contracts (more akin to purchasing and supply chain tools) so that, for example, companies buying parts could have their technical contracts published on Stell (instead of PDFs). I was planning to make it possible to create it with . It's still a work in progress, but McLemore and Wen realized it wasn't the best starting point.
So they pivoted to competing directly in the requirements management category and shipping that product first (McLemore said this was a customer-driven decision). One of the most popular legacy tools in this category is IBM DOOR. This is very powerful, but also very complex and very expensive.
“This used to work in the industry, but it doesn't work anymore in this day and age of working with diverse teams. Some people may not have the time to attend a two-week training on how to use the tool. '' McLemore said.
In many cases, even if companies purchase a license for IBM DOOR, engineers in the field still rely on workarounds such as Excel, Word, and Jira. These tools work well for small teams and prototypes, but quickly break down for more complex projects that require more collaboration. .
“[DOORs] What you end up with is less of an actual collaboration platform and more of an audit log where you just check a box because the customer says you have to. That's exactly what we're up against. I think it's hard to compete, mainly due to inertia, as it's been a while since there's been a competitor in the space that can match the workflow that exists in that tool. ”
“That can hinder these big projects and lead to mistakes.”
Stell founders Mallory McLemore and Anne Wen
Like many early-stage software startups, the company is learning as it goes. Stell shipped the first version of the product to customers last June, but “it's been a journey of intense iteration and experimentation, talking to potential customers every week,” McLemore said. “It's incredible how far we've come from our original design and hypothesis.”
The next step for the Los Angeles-based startup is to build out its supply chain-focused capabilities. Currently, the company is actively selling licenses for its requirements management products. The product includes features such as search, links, permissions, and the ability to view technical contracts as documents and matrices. The search feature is especially important as Stell aims to introduce artificial intelligence. Also, this is far from the norm. “When I was an aerospace engineer, I had to know what document number I was looking for, I had to know which page to scroll to, I had to know in my head exactly where the information was. It had to be kept there. It was kept there,” McLemore said.
Stell has three early customers, all in the space industry, and the company just won $1.24 million in Phase II direct SBIR through the Air Force's AFWERX program. In many cases, those very customers are the ones communicating their requirements to aerospace companies.
The team currently has six people and plans to use some of the new funding to hire several more engineers and individuals focused on compliance and cybersecurity. The new funding will also be used to ship connectivity capabilities such as sharing digital specifications to suppliers, sharing digital specifications to customers, and building supply chain capabilities.
In the long term, Stell could also be used in business development processes, as it becomes a rich repository of specifications and technical data about past programs. That data could be used to inform future proposals in a more data-driven way.
“There is a lot of people in this industry who are working as back-office engineers instead of actually developing products, building new space stations, and working on the mission of what America will face in the next era. I have a lot of friends who feel the same way,” McLemore said. . “So we consider ourselves essential to that mission. So even though it's difficult to compete with these big software companies, we think it's important. ”