In recent years, startup companies have become common entry on the resumes of MechSE faculty and students. From Cast21 to IntelliWheels, MechSE-based startups have put their founders’ specialties to the test.
But before these projects were prevalent, Associate Professor Emeritus Mike Philpott took the leap and started aPriori, a company that began in the early 2000s and is still going strong.
What started as an interesting project has developed into a company with more than 100 employees worldwide and an estimated worth around $400 million. After almost 15 years on the market, the cost management software company was named one of Forbes’s Best Enterprise Software Startups to Work For in 2016.
aPriori developed out of a graduate student’s project in the late 1990s, before startups were a normal part of life for faculty and students.
“It hadn’t gotten there yet,” Philpott said. “The entrepreneur part of our world hadn’t really developed, and now it has.”
Back in 1996, MechSE graduate student Eric Hiller was interning at John Deere and developed an idea for a project that would eventually evolve into aPriori. Hiller brought the project to Philpott, wanting to work on it with him. It gained funding from John Deere Ag and eventually the National Science Foundation.
“It was a student persuading them to do something in my area or research that they had an interest in,” Philpott said.
The project continued after Hiller graduated, and Philpott and a number of other graduate students continued to grow the program, eventually to the point that it was used at John Deere as a prototype.
The project grew so much that it was no longer possible to have it run by graduate students alone. Philpott had two options: sell the software to a group, or form a startup company.
“I thought, well, the first one isn’t very interesting,” Philpott said.
Luckily, at this time, Hiller was at Harvard Business School working on his MBA. He used the idea for aPriori for his second-year MBA project, and won the Harvard Business Plan Competition in 2003.
From then on, Philpott and Hiller were full speed ahead on starting their company. It began with finding venture capitalists to invest, which meant traveling between Illinois and Boston and giving countless presentations before getting an investment from the Bain Capital group.
“It was pretty tough,” Philpott said. “It was a lot of travel. I was balancing teaching and a couple other research programs.”
As the company grew, many of the original MechSE representatives, like Hiller, moved on to other opportunities. Philpott stayed as the business grew, growing their clients from agriculture and construction to automotive and aerospace.
This helped the software become available to more large-scale companies, something that surprised Philpott. Before the company started to grow, he expected more small company interest, but new leadership that was brought in saw the value in aiming at larger groups.
“Learning how software is marketed and sold like that was a phenomenal experience,” Philpott said.
He has learned a lot in that time with aPriori, but for Philpott, the founder and chief scientist for the software company, the lessons have not come in science and technology, but in business.
“I’ve learned a huge amount that I didn’t expect to learn,” Philpott said.
Now, Philpott is a retired emeritus professor and has cut down to just a few hours a week with aPriori.
Despite his smaller roll, Philpott recognizes and appreciates the direction that senior leadership has taken to make it such a good place to work.
The newest CEO, Stephanie Feraday, has created a culture that resembles what Philpott finds in MechSE.
“People do their thing, no one gets in your face, and people generally have a good time,” Philpott said.
aPriori now has people working around the world. As it has grown from a project at Illinois, aPriori has changed in personnel and purpose, but Philpott is glad that the culture has gone back to one of hard work and respect.
“When we started the business, that was the goal,” Philpott said. “We had people of different cultures and we got on fine. People are working together and respecting each other’s skills.”