Ledas Finds Life After Dassault Systemes

Today Russian CAD software company Ledas issued a press release announcing a second consecutive year of record revenue. The press release has an interesting quote from the young new CEO Alexey Ershov.

“LEDAS for many years focused on the worldwide market, and so we made no special effort to win contracts at home in Russia,” says Alexey Ershov, CEO of LEDAS. “But with increased activity from Russian CAD vendors such as ASCON and Top Systems, together with a big government contract for the development of the new 3D modeling kernel, expanded our view. Our company at the same time landed major contracts with customers in western Europe and USA.”

At one time Ledas drew 90% of its revenue from its development contract with Dassault Systemes. From my conversation with David Levin, the Chairman of Ledas:

Deelip: Do you mean that this contract was not profitable?

David: Oh no, it was very profitable. But actually LEDAS was working like a department of DS with a regular stable financing which some years covered up to 90% of our revenue. In addition, the contract restricted us in relations with the DS competitors. In some sense, it looked similar to being a well-financed and strictly controlled state organization.

Ledas is currently involved in a number of things, one of them being the development of the Russian Geometric Kernel (RGK) which is financed by the Russian government. The Ledas press release claims, “While comparable with Parasolid in functionality, RGK incorporates the kinds of novel features expected of next-generation kernels.” I would love to know what these novel next generation features are.

Ledas is also working with Russian CAD software vendor ASCON to implement Variational Direct Modeling into its flagship MCAD product – KOMPAS-3D.

Ledas recently sold its geometric solver technologies LGS 2D and LGS 3D and the derivative end user products to Belgian CAD software developer Bricsys and is now involved in the enhancing the direct modeling capabilities of Bricscad, the flagship CAD product of Bricsys.

This is good going for a company that once felt like a “well-financed and strictly controlled state organization“.