The Allvice platform is the GitHub for electrical engineering teams

There is no shortage of workflow collaboration tools – like Slack or Google Docs, in addition to those specific to industry like Github – for software developers. A startup called Allvice managed to bet that electric material engineering teams also need their own collaboration platform.

The Allvice platform is between existing workflow software. It allows hardware teams to collaborate on the types of documents in which they traditionally work – documents that do not easily translate on Slack and Email – such as PCB files and electronic CAD files, both used to design printed circuits.

Engineers can use Allvice to distinguish and comment on design aspects in these types of documents, in the same way that software engineers can comment on specific lines of code via Github.

Kyle Dumont, co-founder and CTO of Allvice, told Techcrunch that the startup had been able to find success because they had not tried to create a new collaboration platform from start to finish, but rather fill the gap between the software solutions that the hardware teams already used.

“The teams we were talking about already had tools really integrated into their workflows,” said Dumont. “They had these electric CAD tools, they had (management of the life cycle of products), they had existing workflows that we know the product we launched must work.”

This learning came from the research that the founding team made before launching their product to ensure that they were building something that the teams would really use. In the first tests, Allvice not only focused on what their users commented, both good and bad, but also what was not mentioned at all, told Techcrunch, co-founder and CEO, Techcrunch.

“Some of the most precious things we have learned were perhaps the things that people didn’t need or did not want to,” said Ratner. “It helped us to extend something that will be really useful and really an integral part of the workflow. Because we wanted to build not another punctual solution for our space, but a centralized platform that will become this attachment base for electronic teams.”

Ratner and Dumont had both experienced pain points, Allvice tries to resolve Amazon and Irobot engineers respectively. Ratner said that the design of the equipment is not translated into messaging channels and PDFs, and at the end of the time to Ratner in Amazon, she spent the majority of her time creating an internal collaboration tool to solve this problem for Amazon.

The duo met at the Higher School and launched the first version of the Allvice product in 2022, which was focused on small businesses and other startups. The company began to see the growing demand for businesses, has pivoted and has since landed customers such as Blue Origin, Bose and Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity, among others.

The startup has just collected a series of $ 15 million led by Rethink Impact with the participation of the Ventures attitude, Gingerbread Capital and DNX Ventures, in addition to existing investors. The company will put the capital on hiring and will continue to develop its product offers.

Allvice also launches its new AI agent tool which helps to validate the conceptions of engineers and punctual errors.

“We have noticed a huge request to discover how our equipment (and) IA tools can help make their teams more effective, catch these design errors, and that’s exactly what we target for this product,” said Dumont.

The company deliberately launches this new AI agent just in a closed beta version for the moment, emphasizing work with their existing partners, said Ratner. The company wants to be able to ensure complete precision before opening the product.

“The cost of a hardware error is so much higher than the cost of a software error,” said Ratner. “We must succeed in a way that makes sense for our industry, due to this type of large differences between the release of a software product compared to the release of a material product.”