How Cloud-Native Onshape Helped Niryo Boost Robotics Design Productivity by 30-40%

From the very beginning, Niryo has been on a singular mission: make robotics more intuitive, more useful, and more accessible at every stage, from learning to production.

Founded in 2017 in Lille, France, Niryo develops affordable, integrated robotic hardware and software systems designed for classrooms, research labs, and manufacturing environments. After establishing itself in educational robotics, Niryo started developing industrial applications in 2024. They launched the Nate platform, a modular robotics system that can include robots, actuators, grippers, software, embedded intelligence, and more, in 2025. The configurable platform can be deployed quickly and covers the entire industrial automation value chain, from component design to the implementation of turnkey solutions.

Bringing the Nate platform to life required close collaboration between the company's mechanical systems, robotics programming, and software engineering teams. That collaboration was hindered by file-based frustrations on their legacy CAD system, SOLIDWORKS. Maintaining CAD data integrity across teams and iterations became one of the company's biggest engineering challenges.

"We were looking for a reliable way to store our data while allowing every designer to access assemblies and parts in real time," says Robin Guelton, Mechanical Design Engineer at Niryo.

They switched to PTC’s Onshape, where cloud-native CAD and built-in product data management (PDM) make collaboration easy and secure.

More design productivity and efficiency, less IT cost

Moving their design work to Onshape transformed Niryo's engineering workflows. Onshape’s cloud-native architecture lets them work together on the same document in real time, eliminating version chaos, downloads, and delays. In terms of time savings, Robin estimates Onshape has helped increase Niryo's design productivity by 30-40%.

"SOLIDWORKS caused us daily annoyances: software crashes, read-only opening, loss of parts in assemblies due to path or part file name changes, and many other issues," Robin explains.

With Onshape, large assemblies that previously required up to five minutes to load now open in the web browser in under a minute. Hours of work spent repairing broken assembly references have been eliminated. Software crashes and losing unsaved work are problems of the past.

Removing those slowdowns has given engineers more time and energy for design work. Once fully onboarded, Robin estimates each engineer gains a 20-30% boost in design efficiency with Onshape compared to working in legacy CAD.

Beyond engineering productivity, Niryo also eliminated significant infrastructure costs by moving away from self-managed CAD data storage. Rather than investing in on-premise servers and the ongoing IT resources required to maintain them, Onshape securely stores their product data in the cloud, which allows stakeholders to access the latest designs from anywhere.

By adopting Onshape, the company avoided an estimated:

• €10,000-15,000 in upfront server infrastructure investment
• €3,000-12,000 in annual external IT maintenance
• €50,000-80,000 annually for dedicated IT administration
• Ongoing hardware replacement, backup, cybersecurity, and server maintenance expenses

Iterating better designs faster with collaborative development tools

Alongside the infrastructure savings and productivity gains, Niryo also benefits from Onshape’s collaborative development tools. Being able to work simultaneously without disrupting each other's progress has fundamentally changed the engineering team’s workflow.

"One of Onshape's most advantageous features is its branching and merging system, which allows for real-time collaboration on the same product without the risk of interfering with my colleagues' work," Robin says. "We can subsequently choose to keep the best of each modification when merginging the branches. This gives our mechanical design department tremendous power for fast and collaborative iteration."

Instead of spending time managing file versions and external product data, the team can focus on evaluating new ideas, refining designs, and advancing better products.

"Thanks to the real-time history of all design steps, I have been able to develop my creative work without having to spend energy on versioning and storing my various product design attempts," Robin says.

Establishing consistent industrial success with Onshape

Building on the commercial success it's achieved, Niryo is expanding its industrial robotics portfolio while focusing on simplicity, affordability, and ease of deployment.

As their products continue to become more sophisticated, maintaining a single source of truth across mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing teams will become even more important. Robin sees Onshape playing a central role in that plan.

"As products develop, Onshape will allow us to centralize information for each employee, organize the history of our products' evolution, and also manage the production of our products via a BoM system connected to an ERP," he says.

As Niryo continues to grow, Onshape provides their engineering organization the freedom to iterate faster, collaborate more naturally, and bring increasingly capable robotic systems to market.