Toronto-based Upchain, which allows engineers, designers, sales people, purchasers and other product stakeholders to collaborate on a single platform, has raised $7.4 million in funding.
The round was led by OpenText Enterprise Apps Fund (OTEAF) and BDC Capital. The company will use the funding to expand its solution and support business development into the US and Europe. Richard Black, General Partner at OTEAF, and Sean Brownlee, partner at BDC Capital’s Industrial, Clean and Energy (ICE) Technology Venture Fund, will be joining Upchain’s board.
“In the past, PLM projects have depended on large, expensive enterprise solutions that rarely met the customer’s expectations,” said John Laslavic, founder and CEO of Upchain. “A company’s only option today is to use spreadsheets, emails and ftp sites to collaborate across the value chain. Upchain is changing this, bringing collaboration to all levels of sales, design, manufacturing and service – doing so on the cloud with a solution that is scalable and gets your organization up and running in minutes.”
The company’s product lifecycle management platform integrates disparate data sources from clients and suppliers, and gives all parties real-time access to rapidly changing product and engineering data. This allows clients to bring products to market faster and with better quality, in 20 to 50 percent less time, according to the company.
Upchain is a portfolio company of Ottawa-based SaaS accelerator L-SPARK.
“Upchain’s platform is bringing some important changes to PLM and we’re really excited to support them in this going forward,” said Black. “The company has a strong product, excellent customers, and an experienced team that has had previous success in building outstanding software companies.”
