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Gradient Control Laboratories creates venture-scale, market-aligned, technical software products. As team members and advisors, we strengthen culture, address deep technical challenges, and broadly de-risk deep tech along zero to one.
As a collective, we research the future of geometric modeling and engineering software architecture to provide state-of-the art technology to our clients.
GCL Incubator
GCL Incubator
When you have an idea,
that idea opens a market,
and you want to grow.
GCL Research
GCL Research
When you have a hard problem that demands technical leadership for a scalable, sustainable solution.
GCL Components
GCL Components
High-level, highly interoperable,
implicit modeling stack for modern,
cross-platform generative design.
Our industry-leading technical specialties include CAD, CAE, and CAM software applications, user experience paradigms, procedural and implicit geometric modeling, interactive programming languages, and modern data science.
Our human specialty is to build modern software teams who pursue value streams via best-in-class engineering practices.
Our partners, Blake Courter and Luke Church founded or helped lead over a dozen successful startups ranging from engineering software through humanitarian communications.
Research Components
Research Components
Omega
Omega
An implicit successor to boundary representations
Dessen
Dessen
A self-assembling CAD system for agentic engineering
Alpha
Alpha
Our architecture for interactive engineering SAAS
Research Topics
Research Topics
Unit Gradient Fields: While implicit modeling, especially the use of signed distance fields, has delivered ease-of-use and robustness in 3D graphics, they are either too loose or constraining for professional engineering applications. We research algorithms that focus on fields with unit gradient magnitude to enable implicits in scalable, mainstream engineering applications.
Geometry as Code: Unlike traditional CAD scripting, which separates algorithms and geometry, our code-based approach lets logic and geometry coexist, allowing intelligent models that both generate and document design intent. With geometry as code, engineering knowledge becomes portable, reusable, and understandable by AI, which, as free and open software, places equity with creators.
The CAD Isomorphism: By abstracting geometry-as-code to an annotated syntax tree, we produce an isomorphism between textual syntax, visual programming, and engineering geometry itself. We explore the human-computing interfaces of this system to build interactive CAD applications.
Second Order Design Complexity: When implicit modeling for optimization applications, two second order phenomena complicate the language: First, some variables need to be fully differentiable and optimizable, so one ends up with elevated variables or parameters. Also, when optimizing, one typically both implements a function and uses it as an argument. How do we design interactive applications that make these relationships clear without undesirable emergent behavior?
Exactness in Engineering: When we solve engineering problems via partial differentiable equations and integrate gradients to find configurations, engineers implicitly assume solution space is contractible. However, constrained engineering problems typically reveal configuration space holes, disconnected feasible regions, and hard constraints may fragment solution space into multiple components. To what extent can we observe and navigate the topology of solution space by measuring where exactness breaks in its cohomology chain?
Residencies
Residencies
xNilio
xNilio is a platform that unifies mechanical design (MCAD), electrical design (ECAD), simulation (CAE), and documentation (PRD, BOM, GD&T) into a single, automated engineering workflow. It enables hardware teams to detect and resolve design conflicts in real time, reducing iteration cycles and improving cross-functional collaboration. By integrating with the tools engineers already use, xNilio results in fewer costly reworks, higher-quality products, and accelerated development cycles.
VARIANT3D leads the textiles industry with hyperlocal, zero-waste, and customizable 3D knitting technology. The revolutionary LOOP™ 3D CAD/CAM application transforms manufacturing into a sustainable, collaborative ecosystem.
Rapid Liquid Print enables mass customization and unlocks previously impossible designs for products of all sizes across industries. By transforming elastomer manufacturing with our patented Gravity Free Manufacturing™ technology, we’re pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Lattices offer the potential to change the world of advanced manufacturing, but a lack of common knowledge impedes their application. There’s pervasive data about their geometry, manufacturing, and applications, but finding the right combination is an inherent lottery, hampering innovation.
LatticeRobot closes this gap by bringing together a community of engineers into a computationally enhanced working space to aggregate and explore the world’s knowledge of volume and surface lattices, as well as manufacturing surface textures, metamaterial properties, and other properties associated with mesoscale geometry such as composites and multi-material structures.
Team
Team
Blake Courter (BS Mechanical Engineering w/ Materials Science, Princeton University) has led innovation in engineering software for three decades. As CTO and Head of Product at nTop, he established the category of field-driven, generative implicit design. As founder of SpaceClaim (now ANSYS Discovery), he created the first interactive direct editing CAD system, later adopted across the industry. At GrabCAD, he developed the first cloud-based collaborative PDM system, growing the user community to 8 million users.
Luke Church (PhD Computer Science and Affiliated Lecturer, University of Cambridge) has designed and developed interactive programming environments across domains from systems biology to choreography. He led the Dynamo visual language project at Autodesk and the UX program for Google's Dart programming language, and is currently working on generative fine art.
Mariana Marasoiu (PhD Human-Computer Interaction, University of Cambridge) leads our discovery process and architects full stack web applications. Her previous work includes projects at Google focused on user experience and at Africa's Voices Foundation building interactive data analysis and communication tools.
Dan Rubel (BS Electrical Engineering, Bucknell University) has focused his career on building compilers and software development environments. He has worked extensively on the Eclipse development environment and led the interactive code editor team for Dart.
Steve DeMai (BS Computer Science, Syracuse University) specializes in graphics and 3D interaction. At SolidWorks, he led development of the widely-adopted eDrawings platform. At Stratasys GrabCAD, he spearheaded several key projects, including GrabCAD Print and a breakthrough implicit modeler that underpinned dozens of innovations.
Keegan McNamara (BA Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder) comes from a math and software background, but most recently worked in early-stage consumer hardware as an engineer and designer. He was the first engineer at blockchain company Arkham, founder of Mythic Computer Co, and has lectured publicly on CAD's relation to aesthetic philosophy.
News
News
- 29 Oct 2025: Variant3D Launches LOOP knitting design software, featuring GCL Omega for interactive live texturing and visualization.
CDFAM NYC 2025 (recording will up provided soon)
- 15 Oct 2025: Future of Engineering Summit
A Brief History and Future of Generative Design (no recording available)
- 22 Aug 2025: Breaking the Bottleneck newsletter with Aditya Raghupathy.
- 24 Jun 2025: nCDS talk by Blake Courter.
Why Implicits are the Future of CAD (30 min)
- 30 Jan 2025: Gradient Control Laboratories joins the Speculative Technologies Brains Accelerator Program.
- 20 Jan 2025: Agentic Engineering.
- 12 Apr 2024: Differentiable Engineering.
- 1 Apr 2024: Engineering Software Moat Map.
- 10 Mar 2024: LatticeRobot releases public beta of GLSL export.
- 20 Oct 2023: LatticeRobot release public beta at Develop3D Live 2023.
- 14 June 2023: LatticeRobot launches private beta at CDFAM 2023.
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