Fictiv Inc., a high-availability on-demand manufacturing ecosystem for supply chains, today announced it has raised $100 million in a late-stage funding round led by Activate Capital as part of its mission to expand its focus on reducing supply chain risks.

The Series E funding round was joined by new investors from Angeleno Group, Cross Creek, The Westly Group and existing investors including Bill Gates, Accel, G2 Venture Partners and Standard Investments. Together, these investments bring the total raised by the company to $192 million.

Fictiv virtualizes complex manufacturing workflows in order to address manufacturing supply chain challenges on-demand through a cloud-based platform by providing what co-founder and Chief Executive Dave Evans calls “hardware at the speed of software.”

Companies can sign up to get parts delivered for new product development, have parts engineered to order for custom products and as part of maintenance and repair operations. All of this is supported by a wide array of manufacturing options that cover everything from machining, injection molding, 3D printing and more.

“In the supply chain world, if I’m building a skateboard, an air conditioning or a medical device you’ll have this massive team called operations and they’re running a supply chain and they’ll have vendors. Then if you need 10,000 of something you build capacity for that 10,000,” Dave Evans told SiliconANGLE in an interview, explaining how Fictiv makes this happen. “But if you need 20,000 the next day, what do you do? You can’t just double the size of your team and double your vendor network. You have a real capacity load issue.”

This is where Fictiv steps in. By taking advantage of a broad, networked manufacturing base, the company is capable of providing components at the speed needed by customers. The goal is to make this happen as quickly as possible for customers, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to quickly scale up to meet the challenge.

In one example, RBC Bearings Inc., which produces components used in aerospace and industrial applications, began working with Fictiv in 2021 and this greatly reduced aftermarket workflows for the company.

“In our business, every second counts, and Fictiv has streamlined our workflows to reduce quoting time down from seven days to seconds or minutes, and our lead times down from weeks to days,” said Sean Williams, general manager at RBC Bearings. “This type of speed delivers real business value to us and the productivity benefits have been profound.”

Since its founding in 2013, Fictiv has delivered more than 19 million mechanical parts to over 3,000 product companies. Customers can realize over 40% reduced cycle time and 20% greater engineering productivity with an accompanying reduction in operational costs.

Dave Evans started the company with his brother, Nathan Evans, who is co-founder and chief experience officer. Dave Evans mixed his experience in mechanical engineering with Nathan Evans’ investment banking knowledge to build the technology company. Dave Evans said what he learned working at Ford on dashboard infotainment solutions as a lead hardware engineer gave him the vision to bring Fictiv to life.

“A lot of the story of Fictiv began with my experience working at Ford, which was about how do you take a 100-year-old company that’s one of the largest brands, if not the world, and speed up their innovation cycle,” Dave Evans said. “The idea was really about speeding up my time as an engineer. So, over the last nine years, we’ve raised almost $200 million to solve the same problems from my days at Ford.”

Dave Evans said that the company intends to use the influx of funding to enhance the number of solutions it can serve to its customers, expand its regional footprint by seeking out more manufacturing capacity across the world and increase the size of its team by hiring more employees.

Image: Fictiv