Lagoa, which Architosh has written about several times, has been reportedly acquired by Autodesk for $60 million US dollars. The Montreal-based Lagoa, with research and development in Germany as well, was founded in 2011 by Thiago da Costa, the developer of the plugin Lagoa Multi-Physics.
Both Lagoa and Autodesk have not yet announced such an acquisition and the Canadian news source above may have jumped the gun ahead of official reports. It reports that Mr. Costa has not wanted to talk about the transaction but the acquisition has “nevertheless [been] confirmed.”
Lagoa Background
When we first wrote about Lagoa back in 2013, its was a top funded tech startup offering state-of-the-art cloud-based rendering and collaboration straight through your web browser. It also featured an iPad app. Lagoa utilized a proprietary unbiased rendering engined called Lagoa MultiOptics that was powered at the server level in the cloud. Unbiased rendering, in a nutshell, makes the claim that it does not cheat on the lighting work involved in a rendered 3D scene.
01 – Lagoa is a new top-funded tech offering focused on serving state-of-the-art cloud-based rendering and collaboration through your browser. There is also an iPad app.
Lagoa today offers a platform that lets users design and publish 3D photorealistic CAD objects in the web browser. It’s description says, “create kinematic assemblies, renders, and photo real interactive 3D experiences all in the browser. Fast, powerful and all on the cloud.”
Lagoa supports over 40 different native CAD formats, including CATIA, PTC Creo, SolidWorks, and many others including Rhino and 3D app formats. The great news for professionals using Macs is that the Lagoa solution is completely OS independent. And hardware independent.
Architosh Commentary
This reported acquisition is particularly interesting given that Autodesk has a highly developed workflow solution, offering many of the same things to the exact same market in its Fusion 360 product strategy. What Lagoa may add to Autodesk’s portfolio of solutions is the proprietary rendering engine in Lagoa MultiOptics and its unique Product Configurator tech. Let’s just first see if this reported acquisition actually pans out!