Sunglass creates ripples in the 3D design collaboration space; Teams up with DIYROCKETS

Founded by entrepreneurs Nitin Rao and Kaustuv De Biswas, Sunglass is a cloud-based environment that democratizes design by allowing designers to collaborate on a model from different parts of the world. Both MIT graduates, we earlier got in touch with the duo for a detailed interview and since then, they’ve raised  $1.7 million from General Catalyst Partners, Mitch Kapor and others. Now close to a 30 member team spilt between Delhi and San Francisco, the company has been making significant technological advancements and in a new development has partnered with DIYROCKETS to launch the world’s first collaborative 3D printed rocket engine design competition.

The problem they're solving

3D modeling is ubiquitous and a range of softwares like Catia, SolidWorks, Rhino, Inventor, etc. are used globally by design firms. One key issue that crops up is collaboration- all these files are heavy and there are multiple versions before one is finalized. The designers are also located in different geographies and the inefficiencies creeping in the process are significant. “In some cases the problem reached to an extent when people had to physically go to a place to deliver a version,” says the Sunglass head of India operations, Chanakya Bhardwaj. And to cater to this problem, Sunglass was developed.

The Solution

Sunglass enables this collaboration by giving a cloud-based environment to design firms to where the designers can logon to work and manage a model.

Sunglass is free for up to 3 collaborators post which the pricing is on a per user per month basis. Currently, Sunglass is used by students, educational institutes and small design houses.

About the Partnership

DIYROCKETS is a global space company incorporated in 2012 to help humanity establish a civilization in space by lowering the cost of space exploration as much as possible by generating extremely low cost knowledge and space technology through opensourcing and crowdsourcing. A truly global endeavour, the project was founded by American Darlene Damm and Argentinian Diego Favarolo.

Coming together, DIYROCKETS and Sunglass are announcing a partnership to launch an open source competition to create 3D printed rocket engines through collaborative design where Sunglass will be providing the collaboration platform. The competition opened for registration at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 9, and challenges makers, designers and space entrepreneurs to create open source rocket engines that will serve the growing market for small payload delivery into low earth orbit and ultimately, disrupt the space transportation industry.

More details about the competition here.