With a focus primarily on vehicle manufacturers, Exa (NASDAQ:EXA) develops, market, sell, and support software products, and provide professional services for simulation-driven design. Leading manufacturers use their fluid flow, heat transfer, and acoustic simulation solutions to optimize the performance of their products, reduce product development costs, and improve the efficiency of their design and engineering processes. Global transportation manufacturers face increasing pressure, from government mandates as well as from their customers, to improve the efficiency of their products and reduce the impact on our environment. This requires more efficient and alternative power trains, more efficient vehicle shapes, and reductions in weight all of which can be significantly improved by the adoption of simulation-driven design. Simulation-driven design empowers engineers to predict product performance early in the design process, reducing late-stage design changes and reducing (or eliminating) expensive physical prototypes and tests. Their solutions encourage rapid iteration between design and analysis. They provide critical insight into how potential design variations impact the range of possible performance, and enable the discovery of solutions that optimize the trade-offs between competing design and engineering constraints and requirements. The firm having outgrown SBIR some considerable time before going public, in September 2017 French software company Dassault Systemes (DAST.PA) acquired Exa Corporation
