“While we found support among independent and hobbyist users who genuinely wanted us to succeed, we failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup.”
Ondsel raised venture money to sell a nicer FreeCAD and lasted under two years. It landed 145 pull requests upstream since May, and most of its paid features end up in FreeCAD for free. Hobbyists loved it and engineers kept the closed CAD their schools taught them. Venture capital paid for FreeCAD 1.0 and walked away with nothing to sell.