Seed extension for Swiss CAD specialist Neural Concept

Zurich — Neural Concept, the Swiss soft­ware company in the field of Compu­ter Aided Design (CAD) and Engi­nee­ring (CAE), is plea­sed to announce new mile­sto­nes in the company’s deve­lo­p­ment. At the begin­ning of the year, the exis­ting inves­tors, Constan­tia New Busi­ness and High-Tech Grün­der­fonds, support the next growth phase with seed exten­sion finan­cing. Both inves­tors alre­ady led the seed round 18 months ago. With the fresh capi­tal, Neural Concept can acce­le­rate and realize its mission — to bring the enorm­ous poten­tial of Deep Lear­ning into the hands of design engi­neers for real-time simu­la­tion and inter­ac­tive design optimization.

Paral­lel to the finan­cing round, a new advi­sory board was estab­lished to comple­ment the exis­ting board of direc­tors. The two new advi­sory board members, Evrard Van Zuylen and Roberto Schett­ler, bring exten­sive expe­ri­ence in foun­ding, growing and mana­ging successful B2B soft­ware compa­nies in the areas of machine lear­ning and design engineering.

Pierre Baqué, foun­der and CEO of Neural Concept: “I am deligh­ted to advise Neural Concept on its future growth. The company’s disrup­tive deep lear­ning algo­rithms will set the new stan­dard in the simu­la­tion industry

Evrard Van Zuylen, Neural Concept Advi­sory Board: “Neural Concept has foun­ded a new world of simu­la­tion. Deep Lear­ning will not only speed up simu­la­ti­ons and demo­cra­tize them in all areas of design and deve­lo­p­ment. I am convin­ced that this will finally enable itera­tive design of better products at low cost. Rather than seeing this as a mere vision of the future, compa­nies can make it a reality today with Neural Concept’s soft­ware products.”

About Evrard Van Zuylen
Evrard van Zuylen is co-foun­­der (2006) and mana­ging direc­tor of darts-ip, world’s leading AI-based data provi­der for IP liti­ga­tion until its acqui­si­tion by Clari­vate plc. Foun­der (2000) and CTO of Trans­wide, now part of Alpega N.V. Previously, he worked at BCG and IBM.Evrard holds a master’s degree in mecha­ni­cal engi­nee­ring from l’Ecole Poly­tech­ni­que de Louvain and an MBA from the Univer­sity of Chicago Booth School of Business.

About Roberto Schettler
Roberto was CEO of Real­time Tech­no­logy (RTT), a leading 3D soft­ware and services company for the auto­mo­tive and aero­space sectors. Under his leader­ship, he grew the company to nearly 1,000 employees before RTT was acqui­red by Dassault Systems in 2014. He subse­quently also served as CEO of the rebran­ded company 3DExcite. Previously, he co-foun­­ded Core­Op­tics, which was later acqui­red by Cisco Inc. was purcha­sed, and worked as a consul­tant at Think­Team as well as BCG. Here, he helps tech­no­logy compa­nies in both Europe and the U.S. grow to new levels.

About Constan­tia New Busi­ness (CNB Capital)
CNB Capi­tal is an inde­pen­dent early-stage inves­tor focu­sed on B2B product compa­nies that have achie­ved initial market vali­da­tion. An expe­ri­en­ced team of invest­ment mana­gers actively supports foun­ders in func­tional areas, espe­ci­ally sales and marke­ting. The ever­green invest­ment approach supports the long-term orien­ta­tion of CNB’s stra­tegy in buil­ding substan­tial busi­nesses together.

About High-Tech Gründerfonds
The seed inves­tor High-Tech Grün­der­fonds (HTGF) finan­ces tech­no­logy start-ups with growth poten­tial. With a volume of around EUR 900 million spread across three funds and an inter­na­tio­nal part­ner network, HTGF has supported more than 600 start-ups since 2005. His team of expe­ri­en­ced invest­ment mana­gers and start-up experts supports the young compa­nies with know-how, entre­pre­neu­rial spirit and passion. The focus is on high-tech start-ups in the fields of digi­tal tech, indus­trial tech, life scien­ces, chemis­try and rela­ted busi­ness areas. Almost EUR 3 billion in capi­tal has been inves­ted in the HTGF port­fo­lio by exter­nal inves­tors in more than 1,700 follow-on finan­cing rounds to date. In addi­tion, the fund has alre­ady successfully sold shares in more than 120 companies.Investors in the public-private part­ner­ship include the German Fede­ral Minis­try for Econo­mic Affairs and Energy, KfW Capi­tal, the Fraun­ho­­fer-Gesel­l­­schaft and the 32 companies.