A tiny group of developers saw that the future of CAD was on the web in 2010. They called it Buerli.
In what was the mechanical design deal of this young century, PTC bought Onshape on the other side of Boston, the “full-browser” produced by the CAD rock stars who gave us SOLIDWORKS, for $470 million. Announcing the deal, PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann said that it was a small price to pay. Developing a similar CAD browser-based CAD program would have cost us more, said Heppelmann.
But in a skunkworks nestled in the mountains of Switzerland (St. Gallen, east of Zurich) are six brilliant mathematicians and developers who have been creating CAD code for more than 20 years but remain unknown to the world—save for a couple of European firms they were contracting with. As early as 2010, AWV Informatik AG had been writing code for a web-based CAD program they had named Buerli, after a bread (more on that later). It was two years later that six far more famous people (Jon Hirschtick, Michael Lauer, Dave Corcoran, John McEleney, Scott Harris, and Tommy Li) would form Belmont Technology, rename it Onshape and move to Cambridge, Mass., in 2012. It was a “cold start” says Hirschtick on Onshape’s forum. Not a single line of code had yet been generated.
What Is Buerli?
Buerli is a collection of code modules that can be used to construct a web-based CAD application. AWV is working on Buerligon, which is an end-user application that is similar to Onshape.
Buerli is billed as a portable CAD system you can install anywhere (locally or on the cloud) as an engine for your specific application. A developer would use its various components—for example, SolidAPI for solid modeling, HistoryAPI for parametric modeling and assembly—to make a customized CAD application that is fully web-enabled and usable on a browser.
AWV Informatik is developing Buerligons, a general-purpose, history-based, parametric browser-based solid modeler (like Onshape) for end users—rather than the code modules for developers. Buerligon uses the SMLib geometric kernel from Solid Modeling Solutions. SMLib is used by CD-Adapco, ModuleWorks, Trimble’s Vico and others.
Buerligon development is at an early stage but has basic part and assembly functions implemented.
We need more resources to proceed, says Rainer Weigel, CEO of AWV Informatik.
AWV targets manufacturers as ideal candidates for Buerli as they can create a custom web-based CAD product for specific functions. For example, a company that would like to let its customers self-configure a product and supply them with its manufacturing facility to produce the manufacturable model. After supplying a few parameters—say, the number of teeth on a gear, the imprint of a foot, or the cylinders on an engine—Buerligon would provide the models for the parts or the tooling to create the gear, shoe or engine.
The Swiss sheet metal portal, Blexon, has been using Buerli to let customers model its sheet metal parts since 2018.
Other AWV clients are the Swedish giant Sandvik, TDM Systems, and KISSsys, a gear modeling and analysis app by Gleason.
AWV Informatik AG was spun off from the Interstaatliche Hochschule für Technik Buchs (University of Applied Sciences, or simply as NTB.) The company’s first product was ClassCAD in 1998, a parametric solid modeler would later become the server-side components of Buerli development.
AWV developers have achieve some measure of fame from the developer community. The open source development by Paul Henschel, part of the core group of AWV, the basis for our Buerli client, has been downloaded 38,000 times a week from the popular programming community site GitHub. Based on the React renderer for three.js, it received an Open Source Award nomination for the “Breakthrough of the Year” award in 2020 after garnering 12,000 votes.
What’s a Buerligon?
“A buerligon is a small Swiss bread,” said Weigel Rainer, CEO and founder of AWV Informatik AG. We meet Rainer on Zoom, curious to know how the company has escaped notice by the CAD industry at large, as well as the CAD media.
We find Rainer to be friendly, self-effacing, unpretentious, sincere—unlike the slick, brash, always-pitching tech entrepreneurs San Francisco is famous for. There’s no practiced elevator pitch coming from Rainer, no act-now-or-miss-out-on-the-next-big Uber/Facebook/Amazon/Airbnb attitude. Weigel is disarmingly low-key. The presentation is not about him—it’s about the code they’ve written, the solution they found.
Rainer studied mathematics in Germany and earned his PhD at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), one of two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, where he wrote his dissertation on constraint-based reasoning. He taught algorithm data structure for 10 years at the university level. He left the university to form AWV Informatik.
Instead of the hundreds of millions provided by investors, AWV has existed on contract work mostly by Sandvik and a few Swedish firms. The company has built a web-enabled, browser-based CAD product on a shoestring but have done nothing to inform the world about it.
“We are small,” noted Rainer, perhaps with a hint of mild regret but without rancor, “There was little written about us. We had a small article about the work we did with LEDAS.”
That’s all? If you don’t exist on the Internet, you might as well not exist at all. But it would not be the first time that two innovations have appeared in parallel yet only one has gotten the credit. Calculus was simultaneously created by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Our modern-day theory of evolution is credited to Charles Darwin while we seem to forget the contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace.
Sandvik has paid for our salaries—most of them, anyway, says Rainer.
“I am 57 years old,” said Rainer. “It’s time I found a plan for Buerli so my people and idea can continue,” he said. “It would be nice to have a partner to fund further development.”
The Road Ahead
It is likely that PTC was enamored of the accomplishment and the reputation of the Onshape team and the discovery of a relative bargain in the Swiss Alps would not have changed the course of CAD history. Onshape, propelled by hundreds of millions in venture funding, written by an envious number of developers, matured into a fully capable, professional MCAD application relatively quickly, while AWV, which may very well have been the first to conceive of a web-based CAD application, bootstrapped Buerli with leftovers from project work and continues to be a work in progress.
Web-based CAD appears to be taking on new users in a big way. PTC has announced what may be its most profitable quarter ever, and CEO Jim Heppelmann was quick to mention Onshape in the earnings call. We imagine CAD companies without a web-enabled CAD application will want to follow suit and would not be surprised if they come knocking on AWV’s door for some help.
