About Solidworks
Solidworks is now a Dassault company that launched in 1995. Founder John Hirschtick was an MIT graduate and a died-in-the-wool entrepreneur, who had already started a company to market CAD modeler software called Premise, which was developed at MIT with colleague Axel Bichara. The premise was ahead of its time and the market was not ready for it. It was acquired by Computervision, along with John, who stayed there till 1193, when he left to start Winchester Design Systems with a group of like-minded entrepreneurs. They started up with no income but soon attracted investors for their new product. Their differentiator was that the software was written to run on Windows desktops, unlike most of the rest of the market, which were Unix-based. This affordable software was renamed to Solidworks and launched in 1995. It was well-received and caught the attention of Dassault, who acquired the business in 1997, where Hirschtick developed the product into a $100 million business over the next 14 years. Today Solidworks has over 3.5 million license holders and released version 29 late in 2018.