We Catch Up with CEO Ron Fritz.
TechSoft 3D, the company best known for the HOOPS 3D graphics engine, has been content to stay out of the limelight for most of its existence. Despite HOOPS being licensed to several major CAD, CAM and CAE companies, most CAD users have probably never heard of TechSoft 3D. It just runs silently under the hood, and unlike CAD companies bragging about using Parasolid (geometry kernel), rarely do they sing the praises of HOOPS 3D. But in 2020, TechSoft 3D began a series of acquisitions that would shake off the anonymity and began to make a name for itself.
Year 2020, the year that brought us COVID, was for TechSoft 3D, the start of an expansion. Battery Venture, a private equity firm that has acquired over 450 companies over the years, took notice of TechSoft and invested in it. We don’t know how much but it was enough for TechSoft to go on a buying spree. Included in the buying spree was Actify, maker of what was once the most popular universal CAD viewer, Spinfire. This acquisition alone got TechSoft 3D a lot of attention.
Not all the attention was favorable. Critics argued that the shift towards end-user solutions would put Tech Soft 3D in competition with its customers. Also, there was some concern that TechSoft 3D, gathering data from its modules inside a company to be acquired, had an unfair advantage in negotiating the price of an acquirer an acquisition, reported Forbes.
Battery Ventures, the company that invested in TechSoft 3D, has its hands in hundreds of companies. It acquired Newforma, Cimatron and GibbsCAM in 2018 and SigmaTEK in 2019. It also made a sizeable investment in CNC Software, the company that made Mastercam.
Up until 2020 and the subsequent buying spree, TechSoft 3D had only one acquisition: Tetra4D in December of 2013. Here is an annotated timeline of the acquisitions in 2020 and later.
February 20, 2020. Battery Ventures invests in TechSoft 3D.
October 15, 2020. TechSoft 3D acquires Ceetron, a Norwegian software company specializing in 3D visualization of CAE (FEA and CFD) datasets. Why would a Oregon company, flush with dollars, choose to spend them in Scandinavia? The area is a hotbed of industry. Here is COMSOL, a leading CAE vendor in Sweden, as are automotive and aerospace companies, notably Saab, Volvo., Scania (whose cars are all over Europe, not in the US) and Koenigsegg – the head-turning supercar.
November 11, 2020. TechSoft 3D acquired Visual Kinematics, makers of DevTools, an SDK for CAE.
September 7, 2022. TechSoft 3D acquires Redway3D, makers of REDsdk, a rendering module that is complementary to TechSoft 3D’s HOOPS 3D module.TechSoft 3D was to rebrand REDsdk, 13 months later introducing it as HOOPS Luminate.
May 1, 2024. TechSoft 3D acquired Actify, a clear signal that TechSoft 3D was no longer going to be the unbranded, unseen motor under the hood. Founded in 1996 in San Francisco. From 2000 to 2010, Actify’s Spinfire was the industry’s foremost CAD viewer. It was a time when CAD companies kept their file formats secret, and a universal viewer could unlock all those secrets. Actify users, most of them in the automotive industry and using enterprise CAD programs, had to deal with files from suppliers that used mainstream MCAD programs. A $495 viewer-to-viewer made a lot more sense than a $4,000 mainstream MCAD program. But, as CAD vendors began issuing their viewers for free and sharing file formats, the market for a universal viewer shrunk. Actify tried to be more than a CAD viewer, adding data viewing tools to Spinfire, but Spinfire’s popularity never recovered.
June 4, 2024. TechSoft 3D announces the acquisition of Theorem Solutions, founded in the 1990s in the UK. Theorem specializes in modules for CAD data interoperability, visualization, and digital twin solutions. Initially focused on translating CAD data across platforms, Theorem customers are primarily in industries like automotive and aerospace. In the 2010s, they expanded into digital twins and extended reality (XR), providing immersive visualization tools for better collaboration and design reviews.
About Ron Fritz
Ron Fritz is the CEO and co-founder of TechSoft 3D, a leading provider of software development tools that enable companies to build applications for CAD, CAM, CAE, and other engineering software. Under his leadership, TechSoft 3D has grown into a globally recognized company, empowering engineers and developers primarily with tools to create high-performance 3D graphics applications, but of late, a lot more. Fritz has played a pivotal role in expanding TechSoft 3D’s product portfolio, including popular technologies like HOOPS Visualize, a widely used graphics engine, and engineering software solutions integrated into applications across industries.
Throughout all the acquisitions, Ron Fritz has stayed on top of what is becoming, at least in the middle kingdom of CAD, CAM and CAE modules, an empire. Fritz is no ordinary software CEO. He was the life of the party at COFES during most of the conference’s existence, always its most entertaining speaker, and quite popular in the design and engineering software community. It may have helped that he hosted an invitation-only micobrewfest, bringing to Phoenix (COFES’ usual venue) what his present hometown may be best known for. Fritz initially set up shop in San Francisco but now only holds events there.
