Startup Stories: Streamlining Workflow for Engineers

Pradyut Paul ’21 launched his startup Bild, which provides data management tools to hardware engineers, as a student at Yale SOM. A few months after graduation, he raised $3 million in seed funding.

Despite these early accomplishments, Bild’s path wasn’t always smooth. The company went through several iterations and struggled to find product market fit. Only after a pivot more than a year after launching did the team really hit its stride.

“We were able to look ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘This isn’t working; let’s fix it,’” explains Paul, who worked as an engineering program manager at Apple before attending SOM.

He and his co-founder, Avinash Kunaparaju, were able to adapt in part because of lessons Paul learned from SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship. Through the program, Paul took courses with Associate Director Jennifer McFadden and Professors Tristan L. Botelho and Song Ma. He also benefitted from a fellowship with Tsai CITY, a Yale-based startup incubator that helps students design and launch their own ventures.

Paul says guidance from Botelho was particularly helpful.

“He said, ‘Solve for a problem. Don’t build a product and then find a problem to solve,’” Paul says.

Paul drew on that advice when he started Bild to address the collaboration problems he experienced when he was an engineer. But Paul and his team considered several products to fill this need before landing on the right one.

“In the early days, I don’t think we held onto an idea for more than three or four weeks at a time,” Paul says.

In 2022, Bild re-focused to address a particular “pain point” for engineers who must “version control” their design files—in other words, meticulously track changes to code and other data—and collaborate with multiple stakeholders.

“Most mechanical engineering teams are storing their design files in legacy data management systems or generic solutions such as Google Drive or Dropbox,” Paul says. “The platforms do not take into consideration the nuances of hardware design and don’t work well with hardware engineering workflows. This leads to a bottleneck in the overall process.”

In 2023, Bild’s revenue grew tenfold. The company now has more than a dozen employees, including a new sales team targeting Fortune 500 companies.

“The pivot was the lightbulb moment,” Paul explains. “We saw that a lot of people were facing this problem and that we had an amazing opportunity to meaningfully change the way they’re designing complicated products.”

Paul credits SOM with preparing him to guide a startup through its first years.

“Avinash and I were technical by background,” he says. “We didn’t have any idea of what else we needed to think about to execute the rest of the business. SOM gave me a glimpse of the other factors successful organizations need to take into consideration.”