PTC buys Frustum, as gen des heats up

Not sure what gen des is? Generative design is the use of assistive technologies to help refine a design. Need a chair to hold a certain sized person? Give a gen des tool a set of parameters, and let it design the chair for you — that’s called topology optimization. Need that chair to come in at a specific cost? That’s cost optimization. Need to bound the possibilities to those that can be made on a specific 3D printer? That’s an input parameter to some engines. Gen des is a bucket of tools that can crank through hundreds/thousands/millions of design alternatives for a human to then choose from. I wrote a longer piece about the concepts for Cadalyst; you can find it here.

PTC just announced that is has bought Frustum, a very cool gen des provider whose technology is used by several of the main CAD tools on the market today, including PTC’s Creo. PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann said in the press release about the deal that “PTC is pushing the boundaries of innovation with this acquisition. Creo is core to PTC’s overall strategy, and the embedded capabilities from ANSYS and, later, Frustum will elevate Creo to a leading position in the world of design and simulation. With breakthrough new technologies such as AR/VR, high-performance computing, IoT, AI, and additive manufacturing entering the picture, the CAD industry is going through a renaissance period, and PTC is committed to leading the way.”

That’s a basket of buzzwords. Most important, to me at any rate: “Creo is core to PTC’s strategy” and that the company is willing to invest in growing its capabilities.

Mr. Heppelmann’s comments around ANSYS are about the integration of ANSYS Discovery Live with Creo, moving simulation into early-state design, which I wrote more about here. That, in particular, is about simulating the structural fitness of a component for its purpose. Frustum is different, in that it is shape optimization before there’s even a part to analyze.

I could see a workflow that starts with Frustum’s generative design tools to create a part that meet specific criteria. A designer then plays with the result, maybe making it more aesthetically pleasing to humans or ensuring connection points, all the while using Discovery Live to ensure that the criteria are still met.

Frustrum is a fascinating entrepreneurial story. They started with AI-in-the-cloud, aiming squarely at the type of user who doesn’t need a full-blown CAD product because they were designing specifically for 3D printing. The premise was solid: use cloud capacity to do the compute, then refine the design in a browser-based CAD tool called GENERATE. The demos I saw showcased a fast, intuitive and specific set of capabilities. A bit of an antidote to modern CAD tools which can be  a bit bloated, since they have to meet the needs of many different types of users and deal with a legacy of user interactions. The most recent release of GENERATE was to be desktop-based, to take advantage of GPU technology (and, I think, in recognition of the sense that a lot of larger companies are still not 100% in board with cloud-based CAD). I hope that PTC retains some of Frustum’s CAD design principles, in addition to adding the TrueSOLID calculation engine to Creo.

PTC says the transaction closed yesterday, Nov.19, 2018, and that it paid $70 million for Frustum. Frustum is not expected to add material revenue for fiscal 2019 (which started in October).

Nothing was said in the press release about Frustum’s relationships with other CAD companies. I’ll update once I know something about that.