Company Information

It was at the height of the dotcom boom, when that primary internet domain in a company’s name could send investors into a frenzy, that Stardraw.com Ltd filed its documents of incorporation: that was January 28th 2000 and, although the dotcom bubble burst quite spectacularly in March that year, Stardraw.com went on to survive and thrive. Today, 20 years later, we’re known across the industry as the multi-award winning provider of software applications to AV professionals and we’d like to thank our many, many customers, partners and friends for their support over the past two decades.

In actual fact the team and products behind Stardraw.com Ltd. significantly pre-date the company’s formation; indeed, the first applications, which have evolved into our current product line, were launched in the early nineties. Taking that trip down memory lane reminds us that Stardraw 3D, a real-time 3D lighting design package running on Windows 3.1 (!), and ShuttleCAD, a DOS-based application for audio system design and documentation, both emerged in 1993, the year in which charts were being topped by Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle, Doom, Barney and grunge.

Just before this, David Snipp, founder of Stardraw.com Ltd, had spent 5 years at Microsoft in Redmond, WA – where, as an Architect, he led the team that developed printing for Windows NT – before returning to the entertainment industry to purchase the lighting company that had formerly employed him. In doing so he established Starlite Systems Technology, an early developer of moving lights. Technical prowess and his passion for software proved a successful combination, resulting in the first of his ‘drawing’ applications, hence Star…draw, but also a problem; was Starlite Systems Technology a hardware company that did software? Or a software company that did hardware?

The solution was to create Stardraw.com Ltd in 2000 as a dedicated software developer. Having also acquired the ShuttleCAD brand, which had used a Stardraw engine since 1996, the stage was set for the development of a comprehensive product portfolio for the worlds of professional Audio, Lighting, AV and Radio. These discrete products eventually combined, as markets and disciplines have converged, into Stardraw Design 7; the flagship of the company’s design and documentation applications.

As Stardraw.com grew and expanded in the early 2000s, so did the demand for software. Stardraw’s earliest web-based applications were published, as were the first OEM applications; functionally- and brand-specific variants delivered by corporate clients to an ever-growing customer base. In 2005 the ground-breaking Stardraw Control was launched to huge acclaim, winning multiple awards and offering a unique solution for system control, supporting any device over any protocol, without writing a single line of code!

The 2010s saw further evolution and expansion, despite challenging conditions after the global financial crisis of 2008. Our focus was on partnerships, extension of control capabilities, deployment of Cloud-based solutions and the release of Stardraw Design 7, our seventh-generation design/documentation software. As our first product whose architecture shifted from being drawing-based to being project-based, SD7 represented a hugely significant step forward. More industry awards followed. David Snipp chose to focus on his passion for developing leading-edge software, changing his role to CTO, while Rob Robinson, originally responsible for ShuttleCAD from its launch in 1993 and Stardraw.com employee #4, took on the title of CEO in 2012.

Skip forward to 2020 and the view from the top is pretty good: revenues have more than doubled in the last five years and the reach of Stardraw’s applications has extended to around 45,000 customers in more than 80 countries: Stardraw Design 7.3 alone sees over 20,000 user sessions per month and its libraries now contain over 110,000 symbols representing products from 1,030 manufacturers.

We’ve enjoyed our share of good fortune but, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get. Development of new products continues apace, exploiting the newest software technologies and we have exciting plans for the future. These are structured in large part thanks to the input from our loyal user base, and we hope that our commitment to customer service is evident; we pride ourselves on being both accessible and reactive.

However, when all is said and done we wouldn’t be where we are now if it wasn’t for you, our customers, so allow us to say a very big thank you, and here’s to the next twenty years!