Imagine building some of the world’s most advanced hardware-driven technologies—spacecraft, drones, or autonomous vehicles. Then consider not being able to easily share your data with different teams, using clunky user interfaces, and relying on one person to manually enter data into an Excel spreadsheet to bring your project down.
“You’d be shocked at how primitive the equipment is,” says Violet Labs founder Lucy Hogg. She is not talking about the complexity of the devices, but rather the way in which hardware manufacturing tools exhibit a process of balkanization between teams and functions. It’s a common problem in the industry that she and co-founder Kathleen Curtis say leads to greater efficiency.
To solve this problem, Violet Labs is developing a cloud-based platform that can act as a single source of truth, collecting data from all devices and making it easily accessible across teams. Hoag likened the product to Zapier, which uses APIs to talk to various devices. The Violet platform works similarly, creating API requests and aggregating the data into a powerful database. The company is developing a no-code user interface that can serve as an all-in-one tool for hardware engineers.
Hoag, who has a background in astronautical engineering, cut her teeth building a tool called Spyder to automate the satellite design process. This has led her to work for some of the world’s largest companies, including Google, Waymo, Lyft, and most recently Amazon, on the broadband satellite initiative Project Kuiper. When she returned to aerospace at Amazon, after working mostly on self-driving cars for several years, she said she was shocked by the breadth of the toolkit.
“We’re still doing things the same way,” she said. “That’s where we met Kathleen at Kuiper and we both bonded over that frustration. That brings us here,” he said.
“Here” they quit their jobs to work full-time on the Violet stage. The duo spent eight months building the company to produce that device. Violet Labs has closed a $4 million seed round to accelerate product development as Hoag and Caitlin race to market later this year. The round was led by Space Capital, with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Felicis, V1.VC and Technologists.
A large number of software tools are used throughout the hardware product development life cycle, from general tools to specialized tools. The devices themselves are very sophisticated, but as Hogg puts it, “the problem is that they don’t really talk to each other. To work around this problem, teams usually hire a systems engineer or technical program manager to maintain the source of truth between different devices.
Let’s make it concrete. Say a mechanical engineer is working on building a space shuttle. She has a physical model of the satellite in CAD design software, such as Solidworks, and needs access to the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system for another team. Today, she extracts those parameters herself and enters them into a Google Sheets document, can email that to the system engineer or post it to a workspace like Confluence, and then the GNC team manually takes the values and puts them into GitHub or hard-codes them. Bitbucket.
“It’s incredibly slow,” Hogg said. “As you can imagine, it’s prone to error because there are so many people involved in the process and there are so many steps in the process. It’s ineffective, and that’s what Violet is trying to solve. Instead of spending months or months on the Violet platform, teams can get something prototyped in just days or weeks, she added.
In the worst case scenario, a legacy way of doing things is not only inefficient — a problem in itself, for companies looking to aggressively bring products to market — but it can be disastrous. A famous example is the Mars Climate Orbiter, a space probe launched in December 1998. The mission suffered a failure due to a navigational error – specifically, a failure to translate units from metric to imperial. It caused payment to disappear completely. The Violet platform, Hoag says, helps teams avoid such mistakes.
The company is still just Hoag & Curtis, working on prototypes and talking with customers in the fields of aircraft, autonomous vehicles and robotics. Heartened by the feedback they received, they decided to raise funds in May to bring the product to market quickly. Their words resonated clearly. Ryan Isono, VP at Felicity, says he’s heard these symptoms from others in the hardware and robotics space.
Violet Labs has struck a few deals with some of the apps it plans to integrate, including product lifecycle management tool Duro and demand management software Jama. The company plans to use the money to accelerate product development and hire more top-tier software developers.
Hoag says that while there is great innovation in software development, hardware engineers are noticing a lack of innovation in things.
“We’re at this inflection point where there are all these different companies and startups and people who are empowered to build these systems,” she said. “We feel that this next generation of engineers will not tolerate this outdated set of tools. They demand something more streamlined or data-driven or frictionless, and we want to be the one to enable that.
