Why We Are Building SaaS for Engineers
We are building NAVE because engineering teams are under pressure in a way they have not been before.
They are expected to deliver more projects, faster, and with higher accuracy — while the number of experienced engineers is shrinking and system complexity keeps growing. This pressure shows up first in early-stage engineering work, long before detailed design starts.
That is where most time is lost today.
Where this became obvious
For our founder, Cathy-Liis Põlluveer, this did not come from theory. It came from practice.
“As a second-year university student, I joined an industrial energy and water solutions company, Filter, as an intern. I have now worked there as an engineer for over ten years. In everyday work, I realised how much time engineers are forced to spend jumping between files, spreadsheets, and different software tools. It is brutal.
At some point, I felt I wanted to build a solution that would bring real value to the entire sector. If engineers had smarter tools, a more complex project would no longer automatically mean weeks of extra work.”
This experience is not unique. It is common across energy and industrial engineering teams.
The real problem is not a lack of engineers
Yes, there is an engineering shortage. But that alone does not explain the situation.
The bigger issue is how engineering time is used. In many teams, only a small part of the day is spent on actual engineering decisions. The rest disappears into coordination, rebuilding calculations, searching for old files, and checking work that has already been done somewhere before.
Hiring more people does not fix this. It only spreads the same inefficiencies across a larger team.
Engineering work is still fragmented
Despite all the talk about digitalisation, the core workflow in many engineering teams is still fragmented:
calculations in Excel,
assumptions in documents,
inputs in emails,
logic in people’s heads.
Engineers move between tools instead of working inside a system. When projects become more complex, the amount of manual work grows faster than the value created. Senior engineers turn into bottlenecks, and proposal work stretches from days into weeks.
Excel remains the backbone — not because it is the right tool, but because there is no end-to-end alternative.
Why the name NAVE
The name NAVE comes from an old Estonian word nave, which historically meant a lazy person.
In engineering, that idea has a different meaning.
A good engineer is “lazy” in the right way — lazy enough to avoid pointless work. Lazy enough to refuse rebuilding the same calculation again and again. Lazy enough to design a better system instead.
Engineering teams lose time on work that should not exist: copying data, reconnecting tools, rechecking logic. That is not engineering. That is friction.
NAVE is built on the belief that complexity should not automatically mean more working hours.
What we are building instead
NAVE replaces fragmented workflows with one platform.
Engineering logic is captured once and reused. Assumptions are explicit. Calculations are traceable. Early-stage work — concept design, dimensioning, budgeting, proposals — becomes structured instead of improvised.
Engineers stay responsible for decisions. The system removes the manual noise around them.
From weeks to minutes
When workflows are structured end to end, speed is not forced. It follows naturally.
Work that traditionally takes weeks can be done in minutes. Not because engineers rush, but because they stop repeating the same work over and over again. The result is measurable: higher output, better consistency, and less dependency on individual experts.
This is how teams deliver more with fewer engineers.
Why now
Engineering teams are under pressure from all sides: fewer people, more complex systems, higher expectations. At the same time, automation technologies are finally mature enough to support real engineering work.
Teams that continue with fragmented workflows will struggle. Teams that move to structured, end-to-end platforms will not.
That is why we are building NAVE now.
Ready to work differently?
NAVE is built for engineering teams that want fewer manual tasks, clearer logic, and workflows that scale under pressure.
