And to release an AI Agent for electrical engineers (of course). Also, Siemens adds an AI copilot to NX and more software news.
Welcome back to Engineering Paper. Here’s the latest design and simulation software news.
AllSpice.io, a collaboration platform for electrical engineers, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. The company says that the funding will help it scale its enterprise features and bring the AllSpice AI Agent out of private beta.
Lately many engineering software developers are taking their cues from software in other domains. AllSpice was inspired by software development itself. It resembles the developer platform GitHub, offering a CAD-agnostic repository for design files with version control, branching and merging, comments and comparisons, and more.
And of course, no modern engineering software platform would be complete without some AI thrown in for good measure. AllSpice says its AI Agent is “like adding a superhuman to your team” that can analyze designs for errors, suggest improvements, and create documentation.
“By significantly building out our Gen AI capabilities, largely leveraged by the fact that we understand these design files so well, you can transform this data to present extremely impactful decisions for hardware engineering teams,” Kyle Dumont, AllSpice co-founder and CTO, said in the press release.
The Series A round, which was led by Rethink Impact, brings AllSpice’s total venture capital investments to $25 million.
Siemens introduces Design Copilot NX and other updates
Siemens has announced the latest updates to NX and NX X (now part of the Designcenter suite). Since no modern engineering software platform would be complete without some AI thrown in for good measure, Siemens has introduced the new Design Copilot NX.
“By leveraging natural language input and querying, the NX copilot capabilities enable users to find answers to technical queries, best practices and documentation quickly and efficiently,” according to the Siemens release.
In other words: another product support chatbot. Wake me up when it does something Google couldn’t ten years ago.
(To be fair, NX CAM has some interesting AI features that I learned about at Siemens Realize Live 2025 in Detroit. Stay tuned for upcoming coverage of that.)
Alongside Design Copilot NX, the latest release also includes NX Immersive Collaborator, the ability for multiple NX users to share a simultaneous session in virtual reality; NX Inspector, which extends NX’s model-based definition with characteristics for downstream quality and manufacturing processes; Design for Manufacture (DFM) Advisor, which analyzes part geometry to reveal manufacturing challenges and offer suggestions; an improved NX Mold Wizard with enhanced cooling channel simulation tools; and NX CFD Designer software, a new design simulation tool based on FLOEFD.
You can find more details on the update in Siemens’ announcement.
The engineering AI gap
It turns out there’s a pretty big gap between what engineers expect out of AI and what it can currently do, according to new research from SimScale. The cloud simulation developer commissioned a survey of 300 senior engineers about AI and published their findings in a report called The State of Engineering AI 2025.
The big takeaway is that, while engineers are reporting mild productivity gains today, they believe that the technology can offer much more. Here’s a comparison of their reality against their expectations:
The trick, of course, is how to get from here to there. I recently moderated a webinar that digs deeper into the survey results with SimScale CEO David Heiny and Nvidia distinguished CAE architect Neil Ashton. You can watch it on demand here: Mind the Engineering AI Gap: Why Engineering Teams are Struggling to Realize the AI Opportunity and How to Fix It.
Design and Simulation Week 2025
Engineering.com’s second annual Design and Simulation Week is not just any week, it’s next week.
Starting Monday, July 14, this series of expert webinars will explore the top trends in engineering software from some of the leading voices in the industry (and me). You’ll learn about AI, automation, multiphysics and how to make the most of modern tools.
Register for Design and Simulation Week now.
Quick hits
- Siemens has closed its $5.1 billion acquisition of Dotmatics. That was quick—they announced the deal back in April and didn’t expect to finalize it until at least October.
- Mastercam has released Mastercam 2026, the latest release of its CAM software. The update adds several productivity enhancements alongside a new—make sure you’re sitting down—AI product support chatbot thrown in for good measure, called Mastercam Copilot.
- Onshape just celebrated its 200th release. Right on, Onshape.
One last link
Engineering.com editor Ian Wright writes on the history and subtypes of electric propulsion in The state of electric propulsion in aircraft.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.
