It will provide industrial and automotive product manufacturers with AI-powered tools for managing 80% of the product development lifecycle, helping them build and deliver new products to the market faster.

To date, this is the largest ideation stage investment raised by Baltic founders. The round was led by Fiedler Capital, with participation from Nebular, Tiny VC, Foreword VC, Microsoft's former GM Charlie Songhurst, and Change Ventures. The funds will be used to grow the team and launch the first iteration of the product.

In a world with modern productivity tools, such as Slack, Miro, or Figma, real-world engineering projects still mainly run on outdated enterprise software with outdated UX, monolithic architecture, and hefty annual license fees. Trace.Space uses the most recent technologies to help engineering project management catch up with the modern rate of innovation.

“We all take for granted the world built around us. The planes you fly on. The cars you drive. The phone you’re probably reading this on. The Trace.Space team has taken one of the most exciting new technologies that will change the world, AI, and is building a tool for the hidden world of the engineers creating our future. I couldn’t be more excited to invest in them.” – Robert Hegedues, Fiedler Capital

The first iteration of the product is scheduled for launch in Q2 of 2023. The first functionality to be made available to users will be requirements management for engineering teams – the process of collecting, documenting, and validating requirements for the product being built. In many industries, this is mission-critical and requires special tooling, whereas this tooling often requires special training.

Trace.Space's requirements management solution integrates the leading technologies, such as the GPT algorithm, from the start. This will help engineering teams document and revise requirements 10x faster, simplifying the burdening task and improving their engagement in requirements authoring. As a result, consumers can expect higher-quality products with shorter time-to-market.

In addition, Trace.Space's software architecture is built for a non-linear product development process and, with the help of AI algorithms, allows users to generate an unlimited number of product variations. With a plan B always available, the impacts of supply chain disruptions on manufacturing will be minimized, and products will be delivered continuously and on time.

“The tools used by engineering teams for requirements management are outdated, inconvenient, and cumbersome. It's a billion-dollar market that has been neglected because it's invisible and unsexy, while software for later steps of product development has already advanced. Trace.Space will start with modernizing the basics, requirements management, and eventually, plans to do the same with further steps of product development.” – Janis Vavere, Trace Space Co-Founder & CEO

Trace.Space was founded in 2022 by Janis Vavere, Mikus Krams, and Karlis Broders. The founding team has a proven track record of building and scaling venture-backed B2B SaaS companies, including startups Chili Piper and Lokalise.

The team builds on their experience in previous roles that included building and selling software for complex hardware delivery. They saw engineers' frustration building modern-day software-enabled hardware products with outdated tools, which made it impossible to build these products at the pace of technological progress.