For the second time Autodesk has turned to Brazilian Thiago Costa to jumpstart its visualization.
Autodesk is acquiring Lagoa, maker of a cloud-based visualization and collaboration platform for product development. Autodesk is not commenting, but sources contacted by both GraphicSpeak and other tech news sites confirm the deal. The purchase price is approximately $60 million.
Lagoa has been rapidly building out an online rendering and real-time visualization platform, and struck early partnership deals with SpaceClaim (since acquired by Ansys) and GrabCAD (since acquired by Stratasys). Earlier this year it started showing a “technology preview” of a new cloud-based MCAD tool based on the Parasolid 3D modeling kernel from Siemens PLM. The Lagoa Assembly Engine has built-in kinematics, and works interactively with the Lagoa visualization service. It relies on WebGL, meaning it works in the browser without a custom app. Until the release of iOS 8, it also meant Lagoa technology would not run on iPad or iPhone, but the latest operating system update solved that problem.
This is the second time Lagoa co-founder/CEO Thiago Costa has dipped into the Autodesk treasury. In 2010 Lagoa licensed multi-physics technology to Autodesk on a non-exclusive basis. The deal was primarily to support Softimage and its ICE programming language; last year Autodesk announced an end-of-life schedule for Softimage, and has moved technology from it to 3ds Max and Maya.
Last year in a GraphicSpeak profile of Lagoa, we quoted Costa on his plans for the CAD industry:
“There are many problems in CAD; product development is very distributed, but the tools
have been designed for one person sitting behind a computer. So to move CAD
to the next generation, many things have to be re-thought—how people interact with data,
how do we describe CAD data, how does the CAD system scale, and so on.”
Lagoa did well in acquiring venture capital, raising $6.9 million in two rounds in 2013. Participants included Atlas Ventures, Real Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, and 500 Startups.
Autodesk reports third-quarter income tomorrow; perhaps the deal will be confirmed then.
