Encube Secures €19.8M to Transform Hardware Development with AI-Powered Platform

Stockholm-based Encube has officially launched with €19.8 million in funding, backed by Kinnevik, Promus Ventures and Inventure.

The Swedish deep-tech startup is on a mission to make product development radically more accessible and sustainable—turning manufacturing from an expert-only domain into something available to anyone bold enough to pursue an idea from thought to finished product.

It’s an ambitious vision, but one grounded in tangible results. Companies including Volvo Group, Scania and Beyond Gravity have already validated Encube’s platform, with early adopters reporting time to market slashed by up to 50%, production costs reduced by 20–30%, and engineering productivity doubled.

The Problem: Manufacturing’s Invisible Bottleneck

Machining is the hidden engine powering modern life, fundamental to everything from spaceships to pacemakers. Yet despite its importance, the work behind producing products remains stubbornly manual and analogue. Only experts can make things, and even they’re disappearing fast.

Europe faces a perfect storm. Years of offshoring and underinvestment in industrial education have hollowed out the continent’s manufacturing talent base. As veteran engineers approach retirement, institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions have fractured global supply chains, forcing countries to rebuild capabilities they’d outsourced decades ago.

Securing competence in our engineering and industrialisation functions is very challenging. Many of our key people are approaching retirement. Encube really helps us navigate the risk this creates for us.

says Jonas Hellman Peterson, Head of Sales Engineering at Birn Group.

Adding pressure, tightening sustainability regulations now require manufacturers to rethink how products are designed and built from the ground up.

Where 80% of Costs Get Locked In

Here’s the crux of the problem: in hardware development, roughly 80% of a product’s total cost becomes fixed the moment the design is finalised. Yet many design choices impact manufacturing costs and carbon footprints in ways that aren’t obvious until production begins.

Hugo Nordell, Encube’s CEO and co-founder, witnessed this pattern repeatedly during nearly a decade working at Sandvik Group and Aker Group, where he led digital transformation initiatives. At Sandvik, where he built software development teams across eight countries reaching over 100 markets, he saw production costs balloon and competitive edge erode when early design decisions weren’t made with manufacturing in mind.

Hardware development is a balancing act between how a product looks, functions and what it costs to produce. In Europe, we excel at the first two, but our manufacturing know-how is disappearing. We built Encube to change that.

explains Nordell.

Traditional approaches rely on experienced engineers manually identifying potential manufacturing issues—a process that’s both time-consuming and increasingly difficult as that expertise evaporates. By the time problems surface, companies face an uncomfortable dilemma: accept reduced profitability or delay launch to redesign.

A New Approach Built from the Ground Up

Frustrated by how unintuitive, manual and slow existing engineering software had become, Nordell teamed up with Johnny Bigert to chart a different path. Bigert, who holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and previously held senior engineering roles at Skype and Klarna, brought deep expertise in applying AI to complex, real-world challenges.

Together, they built Encube from the ground up to be collaborative, highly automated and—crucially—ridiculously easy to use.

The Founders Behind the Vision

Hugo Nordell has always been fascinated by the intersection where software meets hardware, and how this connection can transform the way physical products are built whilst driving real-world impact. That belief led him to study physics, industrial engineering and economics, taking him from frontier tech in Silicon Valley to connecting active volcanoes to the internet and back to Europe to pioneer the future of how hardware gets built.

In Silicon Valley, Hugo worked on everything from autonomous vehicles and drones to volcanic early-warning systems designed to protect millions of people living near active volcanoes. His work soon caught the attention of Sandvik Group’s board, one of the world’s leading industrial engineering organisations, and he was headhunted to Europe to lead its digital transformation.

During his tenure, Sandvik’s share price more than doubled, and he built software development teams across eight countries, reaching customers in over 100 markets.

That success led to his recruitment into a new executive role at Aker Group, a major industrial holding company in the Nordics, where he was brought in to drive a similar transformation. Across both roles, Hugo saw the same pattern: up to 80% of a product’s cost is set once the design is locked, and even small missteps can cause costly problems later in production.

This marked the beginning of a larger mission. Driven by a bold vision to rethink how products are developed, Hugo left the corporate world to build Encube.

Johnny Bigert’s career bridges advanced AI research and leadership in global tech companies. He began his career in academia, focusing on computational linguistics and natural language processing. His curiosity for real-world applications of AI soon led him into industry, where he has since held senior engineering and leadership roles at companies like Ericsson, Skype and Klarna, as well as several high-growth startups.

Across these roles, Johnny has led the scaling of development teams, overseen agile transformation programmes and applied AI to solve complex, high-impact challenges—from real-time communication to financial infrastructure. He is also an active adviser and lecturer on digital transformation, product delivery and team dynamics.

Together, the two co-founders set out to fundamentally change how hardware is developed by putting AI and collaboration at the centre, helping teams move faster, reduce risk and meet the rising demands of modern industry.

How the Platform Works

The platform works through two core innovations. First, it provides a browser-based workspace where entire organisations can align on product decisions quickly, accessible on any device. No more siloed workflows or single-player software. Second, it embeds AI capabilities that automate workflows which currently require manual effort from scarce experts.

These AI-powered features handle tasks like tracking design changes over time and analysing manufacturing complexity—identifying which specific design choices drive up production difficulty and cost. What once took engineering teams days or weeks now happens in hours, with greater accuracy.

Encube is one of the most promising innovations I’ve seen in hardware engineering in the last 30 years. The software’s ease of use and the speed of its simulations represent a major leap forward.

says Ralf Usinger, Global Head of Engineering Applications at Beyond Gravity.

Real-World Impact

For companies manufacturing through third parties, Encube proves particularly valuable. Mattias Vanberg, Director of Development at Cognibotics, explains: “We rely entirely on third parties to manufacture our robots. Encube makes it much easier for us to uncover and mitigate product risk early in development together with our suppliers and customers.“

The platform doesn’t just help individual engineers work faster—it codifies manufacturing knowledge that might otherwise disappear with retiring experts, making that expertise accessible to entire teams. It’s democratisation through digitalisation.

Riding the AI Wave

Encube’s timing aligns with a broader transformation sweeping through product development. As AI fundamentally reshapes how products are designed, engineering teams can now simulate, iterate and collaborate at speeds previously impossible.

Encube is pioneering this shift by embedding manufacturing intelligence directly into the engineering workflow, shaping the future of product development. We’re excited to partner with Hugo and the team on this journey.

says Tatiana Shalalvand, Investment Director at Kinnevik.

The company will use its €19.8 million investment to expand commercially across Europe, deepen existing partnerships and accelerate development of hardware-focused AI capabilities. With a long-term ambition to help rebuild European industrial competitiveness, Encube is positioning itself to ride the current AI wave aggressively.

Adrian Arnsvik Bjurefalk, Principal at Inventure (Encube’s first investor), draws an ambitious comparison: “We’re convinced that Encube is going to accomplish for industrial manufacturing what Figma did for web design and redefine how physical products are made.”

A More Desirable Version of Manufacturing

Encube’s vision extends beyond efficiency gains and cost savings. The founders believe the age of autonomy and digitalisation affords an opportunity to create a fundamentally more desirable version of manufacturing—one that’s radically more sustainable and accessible.

It’s a future where talent shortage and human error no longer drive needless waste and limit creativity. Where anyone bold enough to pursue an idea can take it from thought to finished product. Where manufacturing becomes a force for creativity rather than a constraint on it.

With European industrial competitiveness hanging in the balance and sustainability requirements tightening, tools that help companies design smarter from the start will become increasingly valuable. Encube isn’t just building software—it’s pioneering a new way of thinking about how physical products come into being.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform hardware development. It’s who will lead that transformation, and whether the opportunity will remain locked behind expert-only walls or become genuinely accessible. Encube has planted its flag firmly on the side of accessibility.