It’s been a week. Let’s wrap it up with a few newsy tidbits that didn’t make it into full blog posts.

• Rescale, the hybrid HPC cloud platform for simulation closed $50m in Series C funding –announced last week, not sure when it happened — from investors including Hitachi Ventures, Microsoft’s M12, Nautilus Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Republic Labs, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. This brings the total funding the company has raised to “over $100 million”.
• We learned more about Lectra’s interest in Gerber. I still haven’t found a recording of Lectra’s analyst event, but the presentation is available and explains in more detail what Gerber will add to Lectra’s overall offer. To summarize: a presence in North America as well as prestigious fashion customers based here, an expanded Industry 4.0 offer to sell across both sets of customers, and “Mutualized future R&D development, addressing notably a broader customer base”, with “Combined R&D benefiting both companies’ customers”. We also learned that the combined company will be called Lectra but that it will retain both the Lectra and Gerber Technology brands. No further details on how the purchase price was agreed upon.
• Hexagon launched R-evolution, a new venture that aims to “reinvent how industry addresses complex environmental challenges”. Essentially, it’s a fund that will invest in green-tech projects based on Hexagon technology. The company said R-evolution’s first investments will center on renewable energy, specifically the construction, and operation of solar farms. R-evolution will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hexagon, and the intent is to spin it off as Revolution grows.
• C3D Labs, a Russian maker of software development toolkits (SDKs) for engineering software, just announced that its 2020 revenue increased by 41% over 2019 and that 59% of revenue comes from outside Russia. What’s fascinating is why revenue growth was so robust: “Following the trend of increased digitalization, corporations are developing internal products and private developers are switching to new, more effective software components.” We kind of expect commercial developers to do their thing, but corporations developing internal products reverses a trend where a lot of companies (Boeing, GM, EPCs galore immediately spring to mind) wanted to shift the burden of software maintenance on to software companies so that they could concentrate on using the applications and making planes/cars/refineries/etc. Something to keep an eye on.
• Continuing on that theme, SAP said this week that it acquired AppGyver, a no-code development platform, to enable with no prior coding experience to build applications for Web and mobile uses. But, like SIemen with its Mendix business, AppGyver also extends SAP’s own ability to deliver solutions for process automation and other applications — SAP highlighted “the creation of workflows, forms, robotic process automation, and lightweight case management.” I do wonder: what happens to SAP’s partnership with Mendix, which had been fulfilling that role. At any rate, SAP and AppGyver did not disclose financial details.

Have a great weekend!