xbim, a leading Newcastle based tech business, has secured £400,000 from the North East Innovation Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and managed by Northstar Ventures as a part of their £500,000 fundraising round.
Although xbim was founded in 2016, Director Steve Lockley began the development of the company’s leading product xbim Toolkit in 2012 during a career break after leaving NBS.
The xbim Toolkit is the leading Open Source, OpenBIM software library, and provides a framework for developers to create their own BIM (Building Information Modelling) solutions for private and commercial purposes. Used by thousands of developers around the world, the Toolkit is tried and tested on many commercial projects including Hinkley Point C in Somerset.
After initially taking on a seed investment from local tech entrepreneur and Angel investor Dan Smyth in April 2019, the team have developed the Toolkit offering and over this time also recognised a need for a standard Platform solution for OpenBIM. The team have developed Flex, the only enterprise level OpenBIM cloud platform. Flex allows commercial clients to integrate BIM technologies with new and existing software solutions, realising the benefits of digital building data in a highly scalable and cost-effective way while meeting complex data governance requirements.
The £500,000 investment will be used for the next exciting stages of development for xbim, focusing on growing the number of partners using the platform.
Rick Charnley, Investment Director at Northstar Ventures, said, “We’ve been impressed with the expertise, experience and vision of the xbim team and their achievements to date. We’re delighted to be able to support them in their next phase of democratising how data is used and managed in the building sector, and look forward to seeing the scaling up further of their innovative solutions.”
Andy Ward, CEO at xbim, pictured, said “We’re thrilled with this latest investment and we’re busy implementing strategies focused on scaling our Flex platform, attracting new partners for the platform at a rapid rate and increasing our developer numbers to ensure we’re delivering what’s need to provide a first rate global PaaS solution for the built environment.”
