Electronics design software firm Altium Ltd has invested in MacroFab, who are developing a Manufacturing as a Service platform for the electronics industry. The investment was part of $15 million in new funding in a round led by Edison Partners, and including prior investor ATX Venture Partners.

The $15M growth round will allow the company to accelerate expansion in North America, including increased investment in R&D, sales/marketing and opening of a new distribution centre for international logistics this summer.

MacroFab aggregates unused capacity at more than 75 factories in the US, Canada and Mexico to give mid-market companies an alternative to offshoring, where capacity is increasingly constrained and lead times are impacted by supply chain and freight disruptions.

MacroFab turns the physical plant of factories, logistics centres and warehouses used in manufacturing into a cloud resource, driven by software and accessible through modern APIs. Engineers can produce new designs faster and supply chain teams can bring products to market at lower costs by scaling from prototypes all the way to production without the need to switch manufacturing partners. The service provides access to specialised electronics factories across North America, allowing customers to scale through every stage of production.

“MacroFab customers found themselves in a perfect storm last year, and went from being curious about cloud-enabled manufacturing to going all-in.” said Misha Govshteyn, MacroFab CEO. “The turbulence started with the trade war and tariffs, and only accelerated with massive delays in delivering products from overseas and the ongoing microchip availability crisis. The old approach to manufacturing electronics suddenly no longer looks predictable or secure. Even the standard practice of airlifting your best engineers to China to troubleshoot your factory line is no longer possible, so more companies are digitising their operations, re-shoring or moving to a ‘China +1’ model. Supply chain leaders are turning to MacroFab and our digital platform as a way to move faster. If you’re not as big as Apple, but want to build across multiple factories in parallel, our platform is the only way to do so without incurring immense costs”.

With over 5,000 companies and 11,000 users on the Altium 365 cloud platform, Altium is a major player in the electronics design space. “Altium shares MacroFab’s vision for digital transformation of manufacturing in the electronics industry,” said Ted Pawela, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Altium. “Our investment in, and partnership with MacroFab is a huge step forward in connecting Design, Supply Chain, and Manufacturing to accelerate innovation.”

“CEO Misha Govshteyn and his executive team have a proven track record of building successful SaaS and cloud infrastructure businesses together, and are now bringing supply chain innovation to the market at a time when global electronics manufacturing is facing disruption. MacroFab is at the centre of driving the digital transformation needed to unlock factory capacity, manufacturing agility and efficiency, and even new economic and labour markets for electronics makers across North America,” said Daniel Herscovici, Partner, Edison Partners, who led the investment. Herscovici will join MacroFab’s Board of Directors.

“A typical electronics factory is only 60% utilised according to New Venture Research, which is startlingly inefficient. A number of our customers focused on Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) issues see our ability to tap into this capacity as a step towards ecologically sustainable production.” added Chris Church, Founder and Chief Product Officer of MacroFab.

MacroFab was founded in 2013 in Houston, TX, and run by veteran team of executives with experience in cloud infrastructure, manufacturing and logistics. Seed and Series A financing for the company was led by ATX Venture Partners and Techstars. MacroFab is the second startup effort for Misha Govshteyn (CEO), Chris Church (Founder and Chief Product Officer) and Chris Granberry (COO). Previously, the team co-founded Alert Logic in Houston, which became one of the earliest success stories in the SaaS and cloud cybersecurity space, growing to $140M+ in annual revenue and over 4,000 customers.