BMW Media Site BMW i Ventures Announces Investment in ELISE.  Contact: Phil  Diianni phil.diianni@bmwna.com     BMW i Ventures Announces Investment in ELISE.  Mountain View, Calif. (November 4, 2019)… … BMW i Ventures announced today an investment in ELISE, a deep-tech startup developing generative engineering software aimed at automating the product development process. The new funding will be used to speed product development and market entry.“ELISE enables engineers to automate multiple time consuming steps of the product design process,” said Tobias Jahn, principal at BMW i Ventures. “We observed high efficiency gains during the initial usage at the BMW Group and are convinced that such achievements are also possible at scale throughout the rest of the organization.”ELISE aims to fundamentally change the process of how parts are designed. Today engineers usually start their product design journey on paper, imagining what a product could look like in the end. However, advances in additive manufacturing not only allow for many more degrees of freedom, but also for the development of entirely new shapes and structures. ELISE starts by collecting the requirements of parts, such as its loadcases, size, costs etc. and subsequently helps a designer shape a product matching the ascribed parameters. ELISE also allows the engineer to include requirements from various other stakeholders, thereby eliminating lengthy feedback loops that stretch product development timelines.In an exclusive beta phase with leading OEMs and Tier1s from the automotive and aerospace industry such as BMW, MAN, Ariane Group and Brose, ELISE has validated its software over the past 12 months and demonstrated huge value-add, saving engineers up to 90% of time in designing products.“After several years of research and development, we have shown our proprietary software to selected partners for the first time and are overwhelmed by their feedback,” co-founder Daniel Siegel says.About BMW i Ventures:BMW i Ventures, BMW’s EUR 500 million venture capital fund, invests money and resources in startups in the fields of autonomous driving, digital car and automotive cloud, e-mobility, artificial intelligence and data, industry 4.0, shared and on-demand mobility, customer digital life, and energy services. The firm has already partnered with innovative companies such as Bright Machines, Carbon3D, Chargepoint, Claroty, DesktopMetal, fair, Graphcore, Moovit, Tekion, Trifacta, Xometry, Yellowbrick and Zum. BMW i Ventures invests in all stages from seed to growth companies. For more information, please visit: www.bmwiventures.comAbout ELISEELISE was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute, a renowned German research center. ELISE develops software that empowers engineers to visually create end-to-end workflows for automated product development by adding established modeling and simulation tools to Generative Design. For more info, visit ELISE at Formnext (booth C72) or elise.de.  BMW Group In AmericaBMW of North America, LLC has been present in the United States since 1975.  Rolls-Royce Motor Cars NA, LLC began distributing vehicles in 2003.  The BMW Group in the United States has grown to include marketing, sales, and financial service organizations for the BMW brand of motor vehicles, including motorcycles, the MINI brand, and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars; Designworks, a strategic design consultancy based in California;  a technology office in Silicon Valley, and various other operations throughout the country.  BMW Manufacturing Co., LLC in South Carolina is the BMW Group global center of competence for BMW X models and assembles the X3, X4, X5, X6 and X7 Sports Activity Vehicles as well as the BMW XM. The BMW Group sales organization is represented in the U.S. through networks of 349 BMW passenger car and BMW Sports Activity Vehicle centers, 145 BMW motorcycle retailers, 104 MINI passenger car dealers, and 38 Rolls-Royce Motor Car dealers.  BMW (US) Holding Corp., the BMW Group’s sales headquarters for North America, is located in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey.www.bmwgroup.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/BMWGroupTwitter: http://twitter.com/BMWGroupYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/BMWGroupviewGoogle+: http://googleplus.bmwgroup.comJournalist note: Information about BMW Group and its products in the USA is available to journalists on-line at www.bmwusanews.com, www.miniusanews.com and www.press.bmwna.com.