It's 7 AM. An engineering lead at a major automotive manufacturer is on her second coffee, staring at her screen in frustration. Her team needs to coordinate 500,000 requirements across three suppliers for their new electric vehicle platform. The current spec management system is grinding to a halt under the complexity. Her suppliers won't be online for hours. The launch date is at risk.

This scene plays out daily from Munich to Detroit.

The tools meant to prevent this scenario were built for a simpler era - when cars had cassette players instead of 3.5 million lines of code, when hardware wasn't defined by software, and when AI was still science fiction.

Trace.Space is changing this.

Built by a team that has spent years in the thick of it, their platform processes complex requirements in seconds, transforms supplier collaboration from days to minutes, and gives Western manufacturers the modern tools they need to compete.

The timing is critical. As products have become exponentially more complex and AI offers new opportunities to automate workflows - the infrastructure designed decades ago can’t adapt fast enough.

That's why we're leading their $4M seed round alongside Outlast Fund and existing investors, including Nebular, Fiedler Capital, and Change Venture.

Beyond Better Software

When we first met founders Janis Vavere, Karlis Broders, and Mikus Krams, what struck us was their visceral understanding of the problem. Janis had led sales at Jama Software, hearing firsthand the frustrations of engineering teams. Karlis had implemented requirements management platforms across automotive and government sectors, experiencing their limitations. Mikus had scaled technical teams at Lokalise and Chili Piper, understanding what it takes to build enterprise-grade solutions.

With Trace.Space, an engineering lead can:

• Run AI to enable automations across a million requirements in under a second.
• Collaborate with software and hardware suppliers in real-time through secure workspaces as they design and build.
• Let AI automatically suggest traces and identify potential issues between software and hardware requirements.
• Ensure all requirements are automatically compliant with regulations.
• Keep all data secure and private while leveraging advanced automation.

Latvia to The World

This investment marks Cherry's first in the Baltics, but we're backing Trace.Space to transform manufacturing globally, with a clear focus on the US market. American manufacturers are actively seeking solutions to maintain their competitive edge in complex hardware development - not just for products of today - but also the products of the future - robotics, medical devices and autonomous vehicles. Built in Latvia but designed for the world, they represent exactly what we look for - founders solving critical challenges that will shape how we live and work tomorrow.

The requirements management market is just the beginning. We see Trace.Space evolving into a comprehensive platform that touches every aspect of modern manufacturing development - potentially becoming the SAP for the next generation of manufacturing.

Building Tomorrow

At Cherry, we aspire to work alongside founders who aren't just building better tools - they're solving fundamental challenges in society, business, and technology. The Trace.Space team exemplifies this perfectly.

Laying the foundation for how complex products will be developed for decades to come, helping Western manufacturers regain their competitive edge, and proving that transformative enterprise software can be built from anywhere in Europe.

That's a future we're proud to back.