Once Helsinki (and now San Francisco-based) Tinkercad announces it is shutting down its 3D modeling service for 3D printing and is taking it’s technology into a new direction. Their describe Airstone, their new product, as a “simulation environment that turns batch simulation into a real-time environment where the user can interactively test different product designs.” That’s a little esoteric, but they basically leverage supercomputers to interactively test product designs, saving time for product engineers.
In addition, Airstone has also received Series A funding led by True Ventures, with new investments from Borealis Ventures and Lifeline Ventures. The details of the round were not disclosed.
In their shutdown announcement email, CEO Kai Backman says,
In parallel with Tinkercad, we continued development of the core platform. In October 2012, we launched a scripting interface for one of the key components, the Gen6 geometry modeling kernel. And finally, in late 2012, we had several major breakthroughs in our research work on the core platform that opened up application possibilities we had never imagined possible.
Given these breakthroughs they decided to move the team completely to Airstone in order to embrace this technology.
Tinkercad will continue to limp on for around a year, before going to read-only.
You can find more in Airstone’s official announcement.
