Leading Hardware Teams to an Agile Future: Meet Duro
Space, agriculture, industrials, autonomous vehicles, and other manufacturers are all still stuck in a cycle of delays and six-figure f-ups, due in large part to outdated product management tools. Duro is changing that.
The future we’ve been promised includes rockets to Mars, climate-proof agriculture solutions, and self-driving cars. And while those types of sectors are rapidly growing, with the median size of hardware investments up over 250% over the past 5 years, the legacy software to actually build any of it doesn’t meet the needs of fast paced innovators.
Today, Michael Corr and Kellan O’Connor announce their $7.5 million seed financing for Duro, a platform that makes product lifecycle management more streamlined and automated, helping teams develop 3x faster and save 25% in supply chain costs. Primary led the round, alongside past investors Bonfire Ventures and Riot Ventures. Jon Stevenson, former VP of Engineering at GrabCAD and former CTO of Stratasys, joined Duro’s Board of Directors.
We met the team in October, and were immediately impressed with the deep hardware product and engineering experience they bring to the table—and the credibility that their solution brings. The team has personally seen how planning issues cause six-figure mistakes in their prior HW engineering work at companies like SpaceX, Acuity Brands, and Adura Technologies. That’s built them fast, strong relationships with existing customers like Gilmour Space, Orbit Fab, Rapid Robotics, Lumafield and Sphero.
Essential hardware engineering and manufacturing processes, such as centralizing a Bill of Materials (BOM), managing engineering design changes, or handling procurement were traditionally cumbersome, convoluted, and outdated. Duro’s seamless integration into supply chain data enables much smoother collaboration between design and procurement teams, which is a huge bottleneck in getting products to market today. We strongly believe that The market for PLM is large, mostly on-prem, and deeply unloved by its users—long overdue for major transformational disruption as more companies want to go agile.
Duro brings agile workflows to fast growing and well established hardware teams, massively streamlining every step of the process for even the most non-technical members of the team. The team has built a great reputation already in the middle market segment, specifically within space and industrial technology, and is well positioned to lead a market transformation while dramatically expanding TAM beyond traditional PLM.