How Tulip is making the connected factory accessible for SMEs

Five years ago, we launched Tulip to bring people back to the center of manufacturing. Go to any shop floor, and you’ll see the workers left behind by the digital revolution. 

We noticed the underlying designs of shop floor technologies considered the human worker a liability, not an asset.

Manufacturing media coverage echoes this message. Coverage swings between a focus on a labor crisis from workers’ skills gap and the industry’s financial health. There's both fear of labor stability for operators and technicians and a skills gap for engineers and other technical experts. 

However, the common thread in this media coverage is that it casts humans as the problem. 

We launched manufacturing’s first no-code platform as a service to change this. 

At Tulip, we believe humans are the solution. It's undeniable to us that humans are the most valuable resource to manufacturers. 

The people in manufacturing need better tools. They need tools as intuitive as apps for consumers and as extensible as other SaaS platforms. 

Tulip enables frontline teams to build apps to run their production, without needing any programming knowledge. This past year, we helped +1,000 manufacturing engineers stay build applications for their production lines. 

Behind every product and feature we’ve developed, we’ve always had a commitment to make it easier for manufacturers to access our toolkit.

Last year, we launched Factory Kit and our free trial to make it easier for SMEs to get started connecting their shop floors. Today, we’re making two exciting announcements that make it even easier.

The first announcement is a strategic partnership with DMG MORI, the world’s leading machine tool builder. Together, our machine and human-centered approaches to digitalization combine to give manufacturers, especially SME manufacturers, holistic manufacturing tools. Holistic tools connect the manufacturing trifecta - humans, machines, and data.

Last week, at EMO in Hannover, Germany, we demonstrated the beginnings of this holistic approach. 

With over 300K DMG MORI machines in use around the world, this is a great opportunity to help manufacturers of all sizes benefit from manufacturing apps. Especially small and medium enterprises. In the US, SMEs account for 98% of the firms in the market according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Europe, this share is even larger. According to Eurostat, out of the 2.1M manufacturing firms in Europe, only seventeen thousand have more than 250 employees. This represents 99% of the market.

This segment is often underserved by new technologies, especially enterprise software vendors.

Thanks to this partnership, we’re now better able to reach and serve these businesses.

This brings me to our second announcement. DMG MORI will be joining Vertex Ventures, NEA, and Pitango as an investor in our Series B fundraising round. With their investment, we’re closing our Series B round at $39.5M. We’ll use this funding to support our global expansion, with a special focus on the SME customer segments in Europe and Japan. 

As a first step, we’re opening offices in Munich, Germany, and scaling our European operations. (If you’d like to join us, reach out!)

 At Tulip, we’re obsessed with bringing people back to the center of manufacturing. With this investment and strategic partnerships, we’re reaching an important milestone for Tulip and our customers. We’ll be able to scale faster, and serve you better. This is an endorsement of the values and approach to manufacturing software from the leading machine tool builder in the world. It is an important validation of our team, technology, and business model. 

We're excited about what this means for the future of Tulip and for manufacturing.