In the second half of 2021, Huatian Software, which started with CAD, began to brew A series of financing after completing the B round of financing. In a month and a half, Chairman Yang Chaoying met with 35 venture capital institutions in his office.
"The change is too big, in the past we used to look for investment everywhere, now we are VCs taking the initiative to come to the door, and we have the right to screen." Yang Chaoying said that because of the long return on investment cycle, industrial software has "sat on the cold bench for many years" in the capital market and has been actively pursued by venture capitalists, which was not even dared to think about before.
Figure | Figureworm Creative
For a long time, the industrial software market has been monopolized by European and American giants, and Dassault Systèmes of France, Siemens of Germany, Parameters Technology (PTC) of the United States, Autodesk of the United States, etc. have occupied most of the market share of the CAD software industry.
However, in the past two years, the domestic CAD software industry is undergoing some trend changes.
Text | Li Yao
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Historic opportunity
In the 1970s, in an abandoned terminal at Shanghai's Longhua Airport, researchers transferred from all over the country designed the Y-10, the first large-scale civil aircraft on the mainland, with great enthusiasm.
I can't count how many days and nights, hundreds of thousands of A4-sized hand-drawn paper, laid out several football fields the size of a few.
From drawing design to production and manufacturing, finally on September 26, 1980, the "Y-10" made its first successful flight in Shanghai, writing a strong stroke for the mainland aviation industry.
"The workload and conditions at that time were unimaginable. Now you can no longer draw by hand, the design of the drawing can be done by CAD software, and can feedback the needs at any time, adjust the design at any time. Zhao Min, executive director of the Intelligent Research Institute, said.
Domestic CAD software will usher in more room for development. Figure | Visual China
The CAD mentioned by Zhao Min is short for Computer Aided Design software, which is simply an industrial software tool that uses computers for drawing design. Nowadays, caddy software is widely used in fashion design, film and television production, and large in mechanical manufacturing, aerospace, and CAD software.
As one of the "crowns" of industrial software, from the 1960s to the present, CAD has achieved continuous evolution from 2D drawings to 3D wireframes, 3D surface models, history-based solid modeling, and then to direct modeling. It was born from a division of the military, aerospace, automobile and other manufacturing companies in the early years, and has become a key technology industry with a market size of tens of billions of dollars.
In the past few decades, mainstream CAD software has almost always been produced in Europe and the United States, and several international giants occupy the vast majority of the global market share.
Zhao Min provided such a set of data: if calculated according to the number of licenses, the market share of domestic CAD software is about 8% to 10%; If calculated according to the output value, the price of domestic software is low, and the market size accounts for only about 5% at most.
"Although domestic manufacturers seek a certain amount of living space in the cracks, but suffering from the domestic manufacturing enterprises application market has long been monopolized by foreign software, domestic CAD manufacturers are difficult to obtain capital favor, but also to maintain the research and development of technical products." Zhao Min said that therefore, the phenomenon of "entrepreneurship is not half and the middle road collapses" is not uncommon.
Yang Chaoying has been in the FIELD of CAD since the 1980s, and founded Huatian Software in 1993, which is the first batch of domestic CAD independent developers. The change in the attitude of the capital market that he feels today is closely related to the country's emphasis on industrial software in recent years. In May 2021, at the academician conference of the two academies, the development of key core technologies such as industrial software was placed in a prominent position.
At the same time, the emergence of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing has also promoted the rapid development of the software industry, providing assistance for domestic industrial software to enter the application and capital markets.
In the eyes of industry insiders, in addition to the above favorable factors, CAD software also ushered in another historic opportunity - Chinese manufacturing is accelerating towards Chinese creation.
At present, the added value of the mainland manufacturing industry has ranked first in the world for 12 consecutive years, and it is the only country in the world with all manufacturing categories, from high-end design to low-end manufacturing, and the core data and practices have been heavily precipitated in the domestic industry.
Zhao Min said that industrial software is used, as the manufacturing industry moves towards a stage of high-quality development, as well as the needs of digital and intelligent transformation, it will release more massive data, technical needs and application scenarios to industrial software, and domestic CAD software will usher in more development space.
Yang Chaoying believes that CAD software is the "leader" of industrial software, and it will coexist with the manufacturing industry: the manufacturing industry must rely on industrial software and rely on CAD software; The stronger the manufacturing industry, the higher the status of CAD.
"A lot of our confidence comes from optimism about the development of China's manufacturing industry. China's manufacturing industry is developing from the previous imitation to positive design. In the future, as long as we embark on the rhythm, it will not be a big problem. "Yang Chaoying is very optimistic.
Speaking on "hard power"
Rare opportunities and optimism are not enough. Yang Chaoying has always been very clear that industrial software entrepreneurship must have hard power.
One night at the end of 2010, on the banks of Daming Lake in Jinan, Yang Chaoying hosted a reception banquet for Mei Jingcheng, who came from Beijing.
Graduated from the French National Institute of Technology, engaged in the research and development of CAD products and cores for 20 years, and also participated in and led three European Community projects, at that time, with the passion and dream of developing domestic independent intellectual property rights industrial software, resigned from foreign software companies and returned to the motherland.
Huatian Software will naturally not let go of this opportunity to recruit talents. Shandong Province hopes to introduce Mei Jingcheng as a high-end talent; Yang Chaoying is also very sincere and hired Mei Jingcheng as chief technology officer. At the beginning of 2011, Mei Jingcheng officially joined Huatian Software.
"Developing products on the basis of other people's kernels and other people's open source is equivalent to building a building on sand, which is not solid." Huatian Software and Mei Jingcheng know this.
As soon as he entered Huatian, Mei Jingcheng led the team to start the research and development of an independent CAD core, vowing to knock down every line of code with completely independent intellectual property rights on the underlying kernel.
Kung Fu pays off. In the past 7 years, Mei Jingcheng's team has overcome the two most difficult core technologies of 3D CAD - 3D geometric modeling engine and geometric constraint solver.
After considering that China's manufacturing industry is constantly affected and presents new development needs due to new technologies such as the Internet, cloud computing, and big data, Mei Jingcheng's team aimed its product development ideas at cloud architecture.
Cloud architecture CAD can be simply understood as online modeling CAD software, that is, software that can be modeled by opening a browser. Moreover, cloud CAD can be deployed in the public cloud, and also supports private cloud and privatization deployment, supporting cloud, multi-terminal and collaborative design. More importantly, cloud architecture CAD is particularly suitable for deployment and use on domestic operating systems.
In fact, foreign software has already begun to develop towards cloud architecture. The actions of foreign giants have more affirmed Mei Jingcheng's judgment. He believes that independent and controllable core technology, coupled with innovative and advanced cloud architecture, is an excellent path to achieve the rapid development of domestic 3D CAD software.
Adhering to this belief and idea, in 2019, Huatian Software created Huayun 3D subsidiary, led by Mei Jingcheng, and is committed to the research and development and application promotion of CrownCAD, the first 3D CAD platform based on cloud architecture in China.
After five iterations and two rounds of national public beta, on September 8, 2021, CrownCAD was officially released and quickly attracted market attention. According to Huayun 3D's official account information, as of June 30 this year, the number of CrownCAD user registrations has exceeded 150,000.
A breakpoint must be found
It is one thing for domestic manufacturers to make software, and it is another thing for manufacturing companies to use it.
"If your software functions are the same as the foreign software that your company is using, why should people abandon the habits and data accumulation they have formed and work hard to migrate to your products?" If you want people to use your software at home, you must find a breakthrough point! Zhang Ying, CEO of Huatian Software, said.
In 2011, Wang Zi, a Huatian software engineer in his early 30s, rushed into Futian Mould Factory with a computer on his back. He set himself a task: be sure to find out the selling point of Sinovation!
SINOVATION is the first domestic 3D CAD/CAM software launched by Huatian Software.
In the nearly one year of stationed in Futian Mould, the prince did the most for the two computers equipped with a foreign CAD giant software and Huatian SINOVATION, compared the functions of the two software one by one, verified the improvements that SINOVATION needed to improve and the features that could be done, looked for differentiated value, and then fed back the discovery and demand to Mei Jingcheng's R&D team.
After two or three years of hard work, the optimized and upgraded SINOVATION is once again compared with the software of foreign giants, the efficiency is dozens of times higher than the latter, and the mold produced is more accurate and more reliable. Coupled with the fact that the price of foreign software is significantly lower, Huatian Software successfully won the cooperation of Futian Mould.
With such resilience and the differentiated value of software, Prince Wei is now a figure that almost everyone in the circle of mold companies knows, and SINOVATION is also serving more manufacturing companies in continuous iteration.
"Huatian's current CAD products mainly include SINOVATION and CrownCAD, if you want to compete with foreign software in the future, the most important thing is that the product itself first achieves a larger use coverage." Zhang Ying said.
As the first cloud architecture CAD software in China, CrownCAD first chose to benchmark foreign software to cope with the vast general machinery market, and then to meet the needs of high-end manufacturing fields such as aero engines, automotive design and aircraft manufacturing. Many customers told Zhang Ying that if CrownCAD can reach the first few versions of mainstream CAD software, then the corresponding market will be easy to open and cover.
The encouragement from domestic customers has made Huatian Software more confident and more sober: the success of SINOVATION products and strategies is only the beginning, and CrownCAD shoulders the responsibility of market exploration for more domestic 3D CAD.
As the executive president of Huatian Software, Li Jianxun believes that the optimization and upgrading of CAD software is essentially customer-led, so if there is no way for more users to use domestic CAD software, then domestic CAD can only always catch up with foreign countries.
To allow more users to use domestic CAD, on the one hand, we must continuously optimize the calculation efficiency and functional coverage of the independent kernel, on the other hand, we must pay attention to the compatibility of the software, "that is to say, the model originally built on foreign CAD can be opened and modified on the domestic CAD", therefore, the domestic CAD software is best compatible with various mainstream CAD software abroad.
In addition, relying on one customer to cover all functional needs is not realistic. Li Jianxun believes that the success of Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes shows that a company's people, money, materials and ideas are limited, and the establishment of a secondary development ecology plays a vital role in quickly expanding the functional coverage and user scope of the software.
"To establish a development ecology, it needs its own strong core and secondary development system to support, which is a challenge for Huatian Software and even the entire domestic industrial software industry." Li Jianxun said.
Go your own way
Hu Qideng, like Mei Jingcheng at that time, was attracted by the latter's ideas, feelings and strength after meeting Yang Chaoying.
Hu Qideng was the first engineer in China to introduce and apply 3D CAD SolidWorks software, and was the technical director of Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks channel in Greater China, with unique insights and practical methods on "how to successfully apply 3D technology to Chinese manufacturing enterprises".
In June 2022, Hu Qideng joined Huatian Software as the technical director of Huatian Software. On the first day of his post, Hu Qideng threw out the concept of a "3D ecological square", and he hoped to start from the top-level strategic design so that Huatian Software "does not need to compete with others" in the future.
He believes that the future competition can be divided into 5 levels according to the business model, the first layer is "labor coolie", the second layer is "product plus service", the third layer is "doing brand", the fourth layer is "doing standards", and the fifth layer is "selling ideas".
"Relevant market statistics show that at present, the business of the first two levels of business models in the market accounts for 95%, the brand accounts for 3%, the standard is 1.5%, and the idea of Apple sells only 0.5%." Hu Qideng said.
In Hu Qideng's view, almost all Chinese industrial software manufacturers are currently in the range of 95%, and Apple's competitiveness is because the iOS system provides an open interface that allows developers to contribute content and develop apps on their platforms to meet various user scenarios, thus establishing a stable and positive circular development ecology.
Hu Qideng believes that Huatian Software, which has an independent and controllable core, can learn from this model and establish a 3D ecological square to be the vanguard of China's industrial software industry.
"Having an independent and controllable kernel is the premise, and with this kernel to establish an open platform, so that all developers in the industry who need to accurately 3D models/content generation based on the needs of various manufacturing application scenarios can contribute content and write professional APP on Huatian's '3D Ecological Square' platform." Hu Qideng said that these developers can not only develop and operate their own APP on Huatian's platform and make a profit, but more importantly, they can work with the vast number of enthusiasts who have the feeling of revitalizing the industrial software industry to build a big ecosystem of Industrial Software in China.
Such a concept has been unanimously recognized by the management of Huatian Software.
In this way, the real benefit will be the entire manufacturing industry, and the future manufacturing enterprises will be both users/users of the platform and contributors/co-builders. "3D Eco Square" will become a standard service platform for industrial software solution providers that is "accessible to everyone and everywhere".
Li Wei, senior engineer of Huatian Software, and Hu Qideng's thinking are the same. Li Wei feels that Huatian Software should not squeeze into the "Red Sea", but should jump out of the 95% business model to create a "blue ocean" and change lanes to overtake.
"Huatian's cloud architecture 3D CAD is the first in China and is also among the leading in the world. No longer simply repeat what foreign manufacturers have done, but to explore a subversive and innovative way, we should consider more. Li Wei said.
"We'll rivet"
In the office areas of Huatian Software in Beijing and Jinan, you can see the slogan "Everyone can use everywhere". This is the slogan and goal of Huatian Software.
Mei Jingcheng said that domestic CAD software, doing market segments is the easiest to survive, because the target users are clear, but it is difficult to be bigger. It is the most difficult to do the general market, because it is necessary to do the underlying architecture and secondary development system for the majority of the mainstream market, but as long as it is done well, it can accumulate thick and thin and be everywhere.
As the helmsman of the company, Yang Chaoying's goal is to "strengthen domestic industrial software." ”
Yang Chaoying believes that European and American giants such as Dassault Systèmes only look like they have a few major software, but in fact have very clear industry solutions. The implementation of industrial software is not just to sell software, but to output integrated solutions, which is a consulting project.
In his view, if Huatian Software wants to grow, it is necessary to pay attention to the combing and accumulation of industry knowledge and experience in the process of serving customers, so as to achieve the ability to provide consulting services to customers and gradually form professional industry solutions.
Such an idea is very consistent with the experience accumulated by Hu Qideng and Li Wei when they worked in the Dassault channel. They said that what domestic industrial software lacks most is the ability to link development functions with the actual needs of customers and transform software functions into responsive solutions.
In their view, in terms of playing style, CAD can be the pioneer, and at the same time, the manufacturing enterprises from the modeling and design, data management, process, manufacturing and other whole processes through, complete definition of CAD, CAE and a series of product solutions, play a set of combination punches.
Zhang Ying, who has followed Yang Chaoying for many years, has been in direct contact with hundreds of enterprises and knows that Huatian Software must continue to cultivate in the CAD field if it wants to become an overall solution provider.
"Huatian Software now basically has all the business links of the manufacturing enterprise industrial software products and methods, and what is needed now is to study in depth along some industries, so that in addition to the common functions and featured functions, the products can also reflect some industry standard suites or industry customization suites, showing industry best practices." Zhang Ying said.
She believes that only by mastering industry best practices and injecting the "soul and thought" of industrial manufacturing into products can we increase market share.
According to her, at present, Huatian Software has been in the construction machinery, automotive vehicles and parts, petrochemical, energy, national defense, military, rail transit, mold and other eight major industries layout, and gradually launched the exploration and accumulation of industry best practices.
On the evening of July 27, 2022, Yang Chaoying forwarded a red poster in the circle of friends: Huatian Software was shortlisted for the "Top Ten Most Valuable Companies for Intelligent Manufacturing in 2021-2022" in the China Science and Technology Industry Investment List.
However, Huatian Software is not complacent because of the existing results, on the contrary, the management of Huatian Software always shows a sense of urgency for technical attack, business innovation and industrial development: "Give us a little time, we will rivet and rush!" ”
Zhao Min believes that in the field of industrial software, it has always been a law to eat small with big, winner to eat, and strong to be strong. If domestic industrial software wants to develop and grow, many challenges are inevitable.
"To do industrial software, we must persevere, work for a long time, and cannot rush to achieve quick profits." Although we have just taken the first step in the long march, we will eventually finish. Yang Chaoying said.