Bricsys And Ledas – A Tale Of Two CAD Software Companies

Today is day 2 of the Bricsys International Conference 2013 in Darmstadt, Germany. As Bricsys Technologies Russia CEO Dmitry Ushakov and I walked from our hotel to the Darmstadium convention center, we chatted about two software companies (Bricsys and Ledas) and how it all came together.

Before he became CEO of Bricsys Technologies Russia, Dmitry was the CTO of Ledas, a Russian CAD software company that developed software components for licensing to other companies as well develop software for other CAD software vendors like Dassault Systemes. Among the technologies Ledas developed was a 2D and 3D constraint system which they were using to add a 2D constraint capabilities to AutoCAD. That’s when Autodesk added 2D constraints to AutoCAD 2010 and Ledas were left wondering “What now?” They looked around and tried to find another CAD platform to showcase their constraint solver and came across the ODA’s platform, now called Teigha.

Ledas starting working on building a plug-in to ODA’s sample application add quickly realized that it was not the best way to showcase their constraint solver. They looked around for a proper and stable implementation of the ODA platform and found BricsCAD. They created a 2D constraint system for BricsCAD and Dmitry showed it at the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Netherlands. Turns out Bricsys was working on something similar and was amazed at seeing Dmitry’s demo. They immediately contacted Ledas and a fruitful conversation started.

Bricsys also had plans to take BricsCAD further and add 3D modeling features to it. Ledas was pioneering the use of their 3D constraint system to promote what they called Variational Direct Modeling and it seemed to fit well with Bricsys’ plans. One thing led to another and Bricsys eventually ended up acquiring all the intellectual property of Ledas and starting a company called Bricsys Technologies Russia headed by Dmitry.

The result is MCAD style direct modeling capabilities added to what used to be a 2D CAD system. Here is a video showing part modeling in BricsCAD V13.

Here is another video showing assembly modeling in BricsCAD V13

Today Bricsys is going to unveil BricsCAD V14 and I’m curious to see the next chapter of this tale of two CAD software companies.