LOS ANGELES, CA and BALTIMORE, MD, Sept. 12, 2023 – Prewitt Ridge, the requirements management and digital thread company, today announced it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding to accelerate the growth of its digital engineering platform that enables teams building world-changing products to move faster and collaborate more effectively across tools.
The round was led by Squadra Ventures, with participation from Stage Venture Partners, Aurelia Foundry, Wonder Ventures, Haystack, Acequia, TechStars, GC&H and leading angel investors.
The company will use the funding to expand its go-to-market team and build new integrations for Verve, its requirements management and digital thread platform that improves data connectivity, while accelerating the time to build from six months to six hours.
Prewitt Ridge was founded in 2019 by former SpaceX and Slingshot Aerospace engineer Steven Massey and Zeke Brechtel, a former engineer at SpaceX. While managing over 40 spacecraft launches across commercial and government customers and working on internal special projects like the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod, the founding team recognized a data problem within digital tools that was making the complex work of requirements management and systems engineering even more cumbersome.
“As the process to create complex models of physical products becomes increasingly digital, there is a growing need for an authoritative source of truth that maps the ‘Why do I care about what am I building’ with the, ‘How do I build it?,’” said Massey, Cofounder and CEO of Prewitt Ridge. “At SpaceX, I saw how the impact of misconfigured and out-of-date changes propagated across the many layers of a model, presenting the opportunity for increased collaboration to help save time and money before a single piece of metal is bent. By weaving the digital thread to create a new data fabric, Prewitt Ridge aims to unlock engineering creativity to solve mission-critical challenges.”
Complex systems such as rockets and spacecraft must be modeled and tested numerous times before they get off the ground. This design process involves massive teams of engineers working in a variety of disciplines, who manually input data across a multitude of digital task-tracking and analysis tools to capture design changes and perform analysis. While working inside aerospace companies and the DoD ecosystem, Prewitt Ridge’s founding team saw firsthand how a single error on a spreadsheet reverberated throughout an entire system, resulting in costly and schedule breaking errors that weren’t discovered until after a vehicle was built and tested.
Verve goes beyond legacy requirements management to offer a graph of engineering data and decisions that captures the provenance of data, where it is used and how it has evolved with the system design. Leveraging advanced data techniques and machine learning, the platform disseminates changes to the graph, and distributes them to the tools that design engineers and systems engineering teams already use. Verve can reduce the time teams spend on propagating changes from months to hours.
Prewitt Ridge cofounders Zeke Brechtel and Steve Massey. Photo by Prewitt Ridge.
The seed funding builds on Prewitt Ridge’s momentum across the aerospace and defense industries. In the space industry, Verve is being used by companies including Muon Space and Hydrosat. Working with the U.S. Department of Defense, the company has been awarded a total of $2.2 million through U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards, and recently completed a pair of engagements with the Air Force Research Laboratory. Previously, the company participated in the TechStars Starburst Space Accelerator.
Building on a base in the space industry, Prewitt Ridge will seek to expand Verve’s capabilities across the federal government, as well as commercial industries, including automotive.
“Steve and Zeke are visionaries who have lived the problem they are solving, and Prewitt Ridge’s world-class team has the deep industry knowledge, empathy for users and grit that will help engineers increase efficiency and save time,” said Guy Filippelli, Managing Partner of Squadra Ventures. “As the U.S. Department of Defense puts a greater emphasis on digital engineering, it is more clear than ever that uniting teams and increasing manufacturing output is vital to our national security, and advancing American competitiveness.”
Filippelli will join the Prewitt Ridge Board of Directors.
"Aurelia Foundry Fund is delighted to invest in Prewitt Ridge. We've been consistently impressed with the top notch founding team and the Verve product,” said Ariel Ekblaw, General Partner of Aurelia Foundry Fund. "With our team's extensive experience in spaceflight hardware and mission integration, we expect that Verve will become a cornerstone of systems engineering best practices across the industry."
The expansion of digital engineering is revolutionizing the modeling of complex systems. The ability to harness data that is connected across platforms creates the potential to build a digital twin of a model. This presents the opportunity to create new workflows that reduce review cycles and allow organizations to better understand how a product will perform in its physical form.
“We envision a future where you can conceptualize and develop a product that meets all of the needs of all of your stakeholders incredibly fast,” Massey said. “We want to support the shift to real-time engineering.”
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About Prewitt Ridge
Prewitt Ridge helps cross-functional engineering teams collaborate to build complex systems. After witnessing firsthand the challenges faced by systems engineers working across teams and tools, cofounders Steve Massey and CTO Zeke Brechtel developed Verve, a platform that integrates siloed engineering teams to create a digital thread that increases efficiency, and leads to better outcomes. Learn more at https://www.prewittridge.com/.
About Squadra Ventures
Squadra Ventures is a venture capital firm led by founder-operators that invests in early stage cyber and national security companies. Grounded in the belief that success is a combination of people, product, and planning, the Squadra team provides transformational support to startup leaders in the complex dual-use technology ecosystem. By applying a growth-stage mindset at the seed stage and a commitment to building alongside entrepreneurs, Squadra empowers extraordinary teams to win and leave a lasting positive impact on the world. Learn more at https://squadra.vc.