Why Dalus.
The future of systems engineering
Today, we are launching the Beta Version of Dalus, the next-gen systems engineering software to model complex (hardware) systems.
Hardware is everywhere—from the phones at our fingertips to the planes carrying us across the skies. The speed at which we design and build new hardware directly shapes how fast we can develop breakthroughs in space, clean energy, and defense. Even with rapid prototyping and other recent innovations, building hardware has remained a slow and painstaking process.
In contrast, software engineering has raced ahead with advancements in AI, continuous testing, and other modern tools that enable quick, iterative releases. If we want the world of futuristic energy abundance, flying vehicles, and far-reaching space exploration, we need new and better approaches for creating physical technologies.
The big question is: how can we make building atoms more like working with bits?
We started working together on Dalus in spring 2024 after Eliot quit his job at Aerojet Rocketdyne (L3Harris) where he worked as a test/systems engineer. He experienced first-hand how silos and poor communication reduced the productivity and efficiencies in the teams he worked at. Sebastian comes from the tech industry in Silicon Valley and founded two companies before. After meeting up, we both realized that we had to solve this problem.
What is (model-based) systems engineering
Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is the practice of creating digital models that describe the entire system—requirements, functions, architectures, and underlying constraints—in one cohesive environment. Instead of dozens of messy Excel sheets and PowerPoints, teams build and refer to an authoritative single source of truth that updates with every change. This digital model helps everyone spot inconsistencies as early as possible. It’s like having a living blueprint that evolves with you.
Why it matters
Developing a new hardware system can demand significant time and resources, but much of a project's cost—up to 70%—is determined and locked in during the initial concept stage. This means the budget is allocated early on, long before detailed design or testing begins, even though the actual spending occurs later in the process.
If engineers rely on scattered notes and patchwork diagrams, they run the risk of massive rework and delays. MBSE keeps you from making expensive mistakes by catching them early and revealing how tweaking one area can impact the rest.
The two shifts in systems engineering
Document to model
Old-school systems engineering was all about spreadsheets, documents, and tedious, manual traceability and verification. MBSE replaces that with a collaborative model that auto-updates whenever something changes, reducing confusion and ensuring everyone is always working on the latest snapshot.
Faster cycles
Legacy projects use waterfall-style processes and take years to launch. Today’s hardware cycles are tighter and more iterative. MBSE supports rapid design-test-iterate loops, giving teams the agility to refine ideas and fix issues before they become bigger problems. If you look at industries like space/defense you can clearly see how the winners in the last few years understood this. (SpaceX, Anduril, etc.)
Why existing tooling failed
Old incumbents
Existing solutions tried to solve this problem, but most are decades-old incumbent software tools that are not made for today’s faster-changing environments and agile hardware teams.
The incorporation of sophisticated software into physical products means hardware designs change constantly. Traditional systems-engineering tools weren’t built for this level of iteration and are too clunky to keep up.
What we do at Dalus
Dalus delivers cloud-based MBSE software that’s intuitive, reasonably priced, and built to play nicely with your existing design and simulation tools. We reduce the friction of setting up models and keeping them accurate. By acting as the single source of truth, Dalus helps your team manage design changes from the conceptual stage all the way to production, maintenance, and operations.
We are just at the beginning of our journey. Building software like Dalus will be a journey of many years, but the team is excited to tackle it. We love working with companies tackling complex engineering systems, whether they be startups just getting their feet wet or large organizations like Israel Aerospace Industries (Our design partner and biggest aerospace/defense company from Israel)
We love getting feedback from our early users and we take it very seriously to improve our product.
10x systems engineers with AI
We’ve built AI-driven capabilities right into our platform to lighten the load on systems engineers. Using natural language, you can ask Dalus to do several things:
Create or modify entire parts of your system model and fetch relevant information in seconds
You can upload large documentation on your system (1000+ pages). Our AI is trained to understand not only text but also graphs, images, tables, or any other information in the documents to either generate or retrieve information about your system. This also works with uploading a list of already-made requirements.
It means your best engineers can spend more time making tough decisions and less time on tedious updates.
We believe in a future where (systems) engineers can spend most of their time on important engineering decisions that have real impact and less on manual tasks that can be automated.
Building the infrastructure for the upcoming hardware boom
The modern age of “hardtech” is thriving across new space, defense, energy, and robotics. Dalus gives these fast-growing industries the infrastructure they need to stay nimble as they scale. By centralizing and digitizing every element of the design process, companies can push boundaries with confidence, knowing they have a reliable, up-to-date model guiding each step of development.
The Dalus team is excited about the future and we hope to take a small part in forming it.