Creative Dock Group has acquired nFrontier, an award-winning specialist in product experience and industrial design. CDG is a "Venture Builder": a firm that designs, builds, and scales new products and services for corporations. So far these products have been mainly software-bases, such as fintech, insurtech, e-commerce, retail, logistics, construction, and manufacturing platforms.
The Berlin-based innovation studio is known for its product development for clients such as Airbus, BMW, Dräxlmaier, and Vossloh. CDG’s clients include Adidas, Ahold, Amadeus, Avast, Bekaert, Holcim, Mondelēz, JTI and Veolia.
By acquiring nFrontier's expertise in prototyping, iteration and pre-production for hardware, CDG aims to accelerate the time-to-market of physical products.
The investment doubles CDG’s presence in the hardware sector. Previously, CDG focussed on digital products, as these enabled a fast go to market strategy and rapid scalability. Today, however, advances in technologies such as additive manufacturing, CNC machining and robotics are opening up new opportunities in hardware. Initial results from the acquisition have shown development cycles falling from 30 to 4 months.
Martin Pejsa, Executive Chairman at CDG, commented: “Our manufacturing & FMCG customers are looking for an iterative and agile approach to developing and commercialising physical products in order to compete in the global marketplace. nFrontier has already enabled some of our customers to shorten their 30-month development cycle to just four months. This acceleration has already been seen in the digital world and we need to transfer this speed to hardware.”
Daniel Buening, CEO of nFrontier, added: “We are thrilled to be the newest member of the Creative Dock family. With Creative Dock, nFrontier has found the perfect launchpad for future growth and a strong home to fulfil our mission of designing, developing, building, launching and scaling hardware products from the ground up.”
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