Flow Engineering raises $23M Series A from Sequoia to bring agile software practices to hardware design

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Speaking of founder mode, we have a founder in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP ultradome. There he is. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Hey, I'm doing great. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. Fantastic. Uh kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, the news.

We're excited. Yeah. Uh I'm Terry Singh. I'm the founder and CEO of Flow Engineering. Uh, Flow is a collaborative development platform specifically built for next generation hardware companies.

Our customers design things like rockets, airplanes, cars, nuclear reactors, and they use Flow to design, build, test, and iterate massively faster than they can do today.

Basically, the way to think about it is we're taking the last 30 years of software development practices, everything from agile to continuous integration, continuous testing, and we're bringing that to the design of massively complex hardware products.

Uh, our news today is that we raised our series A with Sequoia Capital. Uh, uh, and how much how much did you raise? 23 million. There we go. Congratulations. Uh, amazing. I love that you uh you started uh building hardware yourself and and then figured out along the way, I got to build software.

I got to build SAS for this. And what uh what are you replacing most of the time? Is it is it Sounds like am I getting it right? You basically built you built an internal tool for yourself initially while you guys were building rocket engines and then realized like hey seems to be pretty valuable. Yeah, exactly.

So like a little story of the company. Uh I'm a mechanical engineer. I became an engineer cuz I wanted to build machines that mattered. Uh went into the industry went to companies like BA systems and BP and just realized the fundamental approach to designing hardware was completely out of date. Mhm.

So the company started out as a hardware company, not a software company. We were called the rocket company. We built the world's fastest design consultancy for hybrid rocket engines. The best people in the world could go from requirements to to detail design in 12 weeks. We could do it in 2 hours.

And the reason we could do it in 2 hours is we built this internal platform for ourselves called Flow. Uh that massively integrated and accelerated the design process. And that's what became has become flow today.

So are you you're just simulating physics like what is the actual like you're you're I imagine you're basically you're building a workflow and then you're able to are you able to get a good read on if the the the process or the the product will work without actually testing it in the real world or what does that look like?

Yeah. So let me give you the 101 on like hardware development versus software development. In software development, we have canban boards and tickets and you build a spread, you burn it down and you go for it.

When you're designing something like a rocket or an airplane or a car or nuclear reactor, it's much more complex. The way that we fundamentally design and collaborate are using these things called requirements.

Let's say you're building a rocket, you'll say, hey, I need to get this much payload to this delta to this uh orbit. And then to do that I need to design this first stage and this second stage.

And to do that and you go all the way from these top level requirements to very very low level temperatures, pressures, masses, and design criteria that engineers will use day-to-day.

The big problem is that when you're designing a like a humanoid robot or you're designing a reusable rocket or you're designing a self-driving car, you don't know whether those requirements can be met or not. Like 10 years ago, you would have these fixed requirements and you'd be able to execute against them.

you'd build a big gant chart and you'd burn it down. In a modern massively complex system, our products are so complex that we have no idea whether we can design it. The requirements are changing on a nearly daily basis and the design is changing on a nearly daily basis too.

So what flow does is it's a single source of truth for all of the company's requirements and systems information and we glue all the requirements together, all the design together and we have continuous integration between the requirement side and the design side which enables teams to design and propagate changes much faster than the cat is today.

Are you aiming to go straight to the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, the biggest companies in the world that are manufacturing at scale?

And uh maybe it's a lot of steak dinners and a really hard pitch that you get a couple of those clients and you're in business or do you want to focus more on startups, smaller companies, scaleups, like what's the sweet spot for you right now? Yeah, we um we we think about this very deeply.

We regularly turn away Boeing and Airbus and these massive conglomerates. So here's a way to think about it. the hardware engineer mogged.

uh you can't you're like sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry we're we're busy helping the next generation create the next Boeing yeah exactly um so the way to think about it is the hardware engineering industry is going through a generational change right now and it's this generational change from old school waterfall think NASA Loy Martin to new school agile think Nandural the way that SpaceX Nandural and Joby and Archer work are much more like software companies and traditional legacy primes.

They don't design top down. They design bottoms up and things are changing on a nearly daily basis. We're very very very specifically built for that new way of working in the same way this happened in the software engineering industry.

So in the 2000s we went from old school uh waterfall to new school agile and companies like GitHub came about to serve that market. Now GitHub didn't go to IBM and say we're going to build you a slightly better gant.

They went to companies like Google and Facebook when they were five people and they said this represents the new industry and 10 20 years from now these small companies like Google and Facebook will be the mass market and then when IBM and Oracle wake up they will change how they work and they'll come to GitHub because they are changing to an agile way.

So that's what we're doing. We're exclusively focused on next generation aerosp space nuclear defense companies. We're growing very very quickly with those guys and we're making that workflow as good as it can be. How is it going in the Gundo? What's the update? Uh yeah.

So this is like a global movement but as you mentioned the epicenter of the global movement is Elsa Gundo which is in LA. So everything from like rockets, airplanes, robots, cars, uh autonomous submarines are being designed like the the five or 10 square miles which is Elsagundo. Um Elsundo is is amazing.

I think it represents something like 70% of our customers. And the companies in Elsagundo design and iterate at a speed that Boeing and Loy just can't comprehend. They're designing massively complex systems. They're designing and iterating them faster than anybody thought they could do.

And that is the reason they will become so much more competitive than the traditional primes that the traditional primes just can't keep up.

And I imagine what an advantage that is for you being able to walk a few blocks and like see your product in action and actually get that real-time feedback and then just be on that same you know iteration cycle with your customers.

Uh yeah we we have a kind of crazy story which is um most of our like most of the other tools in the market came from Elsa Gundo. We actually came from London and we were engineers and we wanted to build um and the European market just didn't want speed or at least the market that 5 years ago didn't want speed.

So we sold into traditional legacy companies and they they fell in love with the dream and the mission but they didn't really they didn't really use the software and then the Elsagundo market found flow and they pulled us into it and what started out as just one or two companies working in this crazy new way designing and iterating like a software company have ended up becoming the new market and that represents a really important part of our customer base.

Well congratulations in the funding news congratulations on the progress and good luck to you. Thank you for when you announce the bee. Come on over. 20 minutes. We're 20 20 30 minutes from the Gundo Hollywood. We'd love to have you. A sweet. I'd appreciate it. Bring the gong in person. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a great day for the whole team. Catch you guys. And when you announce that series B, you know what you got to do. I know. Go over to getbasel. com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch cape. Take a couple mil off the table in secondary. Put in an FPJ.

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Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service. It's a vacation home but better that never gets old. Jordy, uh I just saw a post that I'm not going to read on the timeline. That is funny. Um but uh anyways, uh story. Cool. Cool story. No.

Uh what I was going to say, I was going to check the timeline before we get off. We uh have to enter our fourth and then fifth hour of podcasting. So glad we get to Jackson Doll is, I believe, already here uh at the in the Ultra Down. Breaking news. We're doing we're going to be doing his podcast right now.

Uh so so head over there, subscribe, turn notifications on to Dialectic, and then you'll hear us talk more if you're not sick. Yeah. I don't know when this episode will come out, but if you message Jackson now or you comment on one of his posts, I'm sure you can ask uh some questions uh there.

And uh we hope you have a fantastic evening. We will be back tomorrow for another beautiful day of technology. Hopefully, it's another cozy, warm day and we can put the fire on. I really enjoyed the fire. We should have the fire on for for Jackson's podcast. We'll we'll Yeah, we'll consult with him.

Uh thank you so much for We'll see you tomorrow. See you guys tomorrow. Cheers. Thank you.