Foundation  
iCapp GmbH was founded in February 2000 by Dr. Jörg Danzberg and Dr. Stefan Schmälzle. At this time both had graduated and completed their theses, at the institutes for "Virtual Production" (IVP) and "Machine Tools and Manufacturing" (IWF) of the "Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich" (ETH Zürich). Ideas for applied research work have been the basis for the spin-off company. The development of the software "MethoPlan" to support method planning in car body construction has taken center stage in the early years of the company.

The business plan for iCapp GmbH was given a 3rd place prize in the contest "Venture 2000" (McKinsey, ETH Zurich). In addition, in 2001 it was one of 10 business ideas to win the competition "Swiss Technology Award 2001".

Figure left: Founders on the front page of the supplement of the financial magazine Bilanz in February 2001.
Core Competence  
Today our focus is on the development and licensing of software, for the design and modeling of free form surfaces. We use synergies from our specialist fields, NURBS mathematics and metal forming technology to develop process oriented and efficient tools. Therefore we closely collaborate with our customers. Usability comes first.

Fields of Activity  

Today's field of software is mostly driven by PLM-Systems such as CATIA or UNIGRAPHICS. However there are still many tasks relating to planning and design that are not sufficiently resolved.

In close collaboration with competent tool and die shops, we develop software tools for these complex tasks in accordance with actual practice. In addition to the implementation in our stand-alone software panelshop, we cooperate with partner companies in order to allocate our solutions directly into PLM-systems.

Digitized 3-D surfaces can be transformed from mesh or point data to NURBS faces. Our software is specialized to capture free form geometry with complex shapes. Data sources can be any (optical) measurement device, or may be the result of an FEA calculation method.

Manufacturers of machine tools often also develop the software themselves, to use and control their machines. The handling of free form surfaces imposes high demands on the applied algorithms. The design of turbine blades for example, must ensure that no curvature changes will take place within the blade faces. For this or other types of tasks, we develop functional libraries with or without a graphical interface. The customer can then directly link them to his application.

We offer the use of our software tools also as a service. A main focus here is reverse engineering.

Using our own powerful software, we are able to apply additional boundary conditions to the NURBS approximation. This is often needed to control more than just tangents, e.g. symmetry. Our spectrum of parts covers for example, ship hull surfaces, sheet metal parts and medical implants.