Altium makes strategic investment in MacroFab

Update: June 22, 2021

Altium makes strategic investment in MacroFab

Altium makes strategic investment in MacroFab

Altium, the electronics design software specialist, has joined a $15m funding round in MacroFab, a US company that is digitising electronics production from the design stage to prototype development and commercial production.

The investment from Altium follows a strong record of growth by the company, which has been helped by the growing adoption of digital manufacturing by production scale customers in industrial, IoT and energy sectors.

According to MacroFab, the $15m funding round will allow the company to accelerate expansion in North America, including increased investment in R&D, sales/marketing and opening of a new distribution centre for international logistics.

The MacroFab digital platform is used by supply chain teams to build PCB assemblies up to fully tested and packaged electronics products and has been used to consolidate vendors or re-shore production from China to North America.

MacroFab aggregates unused capacity at 75+ factories in the US, Canada and Mexico to give mid-market companies an alternative to offshoring, where capacity is increasingly constrained and lead times are impacted by supply chain and freight disruptions.

MacroFab enables engineers to produce new designs faster and helps supply chain teams economically bring products to market by scaling from prototypes all the way to production without the need to switch manufacturing partners because MacroFab owns delivery end-to-end throughout the process regardless of factory location.

“MacroFab customers found themselves in a perfect storm last year, and went from being curious about cloud-enabled manufacturing to going all-in.” said Misha Govshteyn, MacroFab CEO. “The turbulence started with the trade war and tariffs, and only accelerated with massive delays in delivering products from overseas and the ongoing microchip availability crisis. The old approach to manufacturing electronics suddenly no longer looks predictable or secure, so more companies are digitising their operations, reshoring or moving to a ‘China +1’ model.”

Altium said that it joined the round as an investor because it shares MacroFab’s vision for digital transformation of manufacturing in the electronics industry.

According to Ted Pawela, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Altium. “Our investment in, and partnership with MacroFab is a huge step forward in connecting Design, Supply Chain, and Manufacturing to accelerate innovation.”