It doesn't look good when a co-founder leaves for a day job with another company in the same space - which is what Blake Coulter did in early 2013 when he surfaced at GrabCAD. Even perennial contender Solid Edge had risen to an order of magnitude larger. But not enough to change the big picture. The tactics seemed to vary with the weather.Īs late as December of last year, SpaceClaim claimed to have 40,000 seats. Then maybe users would want to use it to convert files from one CAD system to another, or to use it as a super viewer of CAD data.Then SpaceClaim became a front end to CAE software.SpaceClaim's 'adjacent seat' tactic really meant that customers had to to have two CAD systems - one more than the number CAD users want. Then it proved to be difficult to unseat SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer users.

Its subscription pricing came was ahead of the times, and was eventually abandoned for conventional perpetual licensing.Some would say it faltered out of the gate: Despite all its promise, however, it failed to take the world by storm. On the product side, CAD insiders gave it a thumbs up. It was easy to use, and with direct modeling being the trending topic in MCAD, it seemed to be in the right place at the right time. The CAD world expected a lot from SpaceClaim: a promising startup founded in 2005 by none other than Mike Payne, whose previous companies - PTC and SolidWorks - forever changed mechanical design.

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