3 on a Tuesday: Autodesk walks away from Altium deal; MarkForged is a public company; DS 3DX moves beyond CAD in AEC

I know – it’s not Friday, no matter how much we might wish it to be. But there’s a lot to catch up on, so let’s get right to it:

Remember last month, when news broke that Autodesk was interested in acquiring Altium, the maker of EDA solutions? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?! Well, that deal is now off the table. Autodesk didn’t explain much but an Autodesk person was quoted in an Australian newspaper as saying, “We are not commenting on matters with Altium but can confirm that acquisition discussions have ceased at this time”. According to people quoted in that article, Altium is expecting a BIG offer, an expectation unlikely to be met.

Remember, too, when MarkForged announced that it was going to merge with an SPAC as a way of listing on a stock exchange? That’s now a done deal, with MarkForged trading on the New York Stock Exchange as MKFG. In the transaction with the SPAC, Markforged received about $360 million of gross proceeds (before transaction expenses), which the company expects to use to “build new relationships as a critical partner to even more leading global manufacturers, leveraging its expanded platform and proceeds from the transaction to accelerate its impact and growth”.

Finally, for now, an announcement came today that ReNew Power, a renewable energy utlity in India, will use Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience platform to manage its solar, wind and hybrid engineering, procurement and construction projects. I don’t often write about this type of anouncement because it’s typically very self-serving, but this one is notable because ReNew will use DS’ “Capital Facilities Information Excellence” solution without doing any design work on the platform — it’s intent is to use 3DX to track the progress of its complex projects to ensure on-time,on-budget delivery, mange risk, etc. The age when DS was (just) the CATIA company is truly gone. According to DS, ReNew expects its implementation to “provide centralized project execution and monitoring data, personalized dashboards, progress graphs, timely insights and intuitive reports to improve productivity”. I need to write more about this, but for many in AEC, 3DX is a “CDE” or common data environment, that’s incrediby useful outside the typical CAD/CAM arena.

TTFN – more to come.