Dalus Is Building the CAD of Systems Engineering, and Aerospace Needs It Yesterday

The Macro: The Tools Are Older Than the Engineers

If you’ve never worked in aerospace or defense engineering, the state of systems engineering software will genuinely surprise you. Teams building satellites, rockets, and autonomous vehicles are managing requirements in spreadsheets. They’re tracing dependencies across Word documents. They’re running analyses in disconnected tools that don’t talk to each other, then manually reconciling the results in meetings that could have been avoided if the software just worked.

This isn’t a niche problem. The global systems engineering market was valued at roughly $7.5 billion in 2024, and it’s projected to more than double by the early 2030s. That growth is being driven by increasing system complexity in aerospace, defense, automotive, and robotics. The hardware these teams are building is getting more sophisticated every year, but the tools they use to design and validate those systems have barely evolved since the 2000s.

The incumbent players tell the story. IBM Rational DOORS has been the default requirements management tool for decades, and it feels like it. Siemens Teamcenter and Dassault’s CATIA handle parts of the puzzle but not the whole thing. MagicDraw, now Cameo Systems Modeler under Dassault, supports SysML modeling but with a learning curve that borders on punitive. None of these tools were built for real-time collaboration. None of them have meaningful AI integration. And none of them make it easy to go from requirements to architecture to analysis without stitching together multiple products from multiple vendors.

The SysML v2 specification, released in late 2024, is supposed to modernize the modeling language itself. But a better language without better tooling is like upgrading the alphabet without building a word processor. Someone has to build the tool that makes SysML v2 usable for actual engineering teams.

The Micro: A Rocket Engineer and a Brain-Computer Interface Founder Walk Into a Text Editor

Dalus is building an AI-powered systems engineering platform that handles requirements management, system architecture decomposition, analysis and verification, test planning, and system safety assessment in a single collaborative environment. The platform is built on the SysML v2 specification, which matters because it means the underlying data model is modern and interoperable rather than proprietary and locked down.

The co-founders bring a specific kind of credibility to this. Sebastian Volkl is the CEO. He previously co-founded two companies, one a software startup he sold, and another building brain-computer interface electronics. Before Dalus, he worked on a project with the European Space Agency modeling a greenhouse module for the Moon. That’s where he saw firsthand how broken the existing tooling was. Eliot Khachi is the CTO. He worked as a systems integration and test engineer at Aerojet Rocketdyne, where he planned tests for a propulsion system undergoing proof of design for the Navy. Both of them experienced the pain from the inside, which is usually a better signal than reading about it in a market report.

The product has a few things that stand out. Dalus Copilot is an AI assistant that can generate system architectures from requirements and flag issues automatically. The platform supports branching workflows, which means engineering teams can explore design alternatives without overwriting each other’s work. Requirements trace through to test cases and analyses in real time, so when something changes upstream, everything downstream updates.

They came through YC’s Winter 2025 batch. Pricing runs from free (one model, 250 elements) to $99 per editor per month for the basic tier, $249 for pro, and custom enterprise pricing that includes on-premise deployment and SSO. They’re SOC 2 Type 2 certified and support AWS GovCloud, which tells you they’re serious about the defense market.

The Verdict

I think Dalus is going after a real gap. The systems engineering toolchain is fragmented, outdated, and hostile to collaboration. If you’re an engineering team that’s currently managing requirements in DOORS, modeling in Cameo, running analyses in MATLAB, and coordinating through email, the pitch of having all of that in one real-time platform is genuinely compelling.

The risk is adoption friction. Defense and aerospace organizations move slowly on tooling changes. Procurement cycles are long. Certification requirements add layers of evaluation. Being SOC 2 certified and GovCloud-ready helps, but breaking into these accounts still takes time and relationships.

Thirty days from now, I’d want to know how many engineering teams are actively using the product versus just evaluating it. Sixty days, I’d want to see whether the AI copilot features are driving meaningful time savings or just generating architectures that still need heavy manual editing. Ninety days, the question is whether Dalus can land a marquee defense or aerospace customer that gives other organizations permission to switch. The product looks right. The founders have lived the problem. Now it’s about whether large, slow-moving organizations will actually change their tools.