Case Study: Black Swift Technologies achieves instant version rollback and design flexibility with Onshape

Black Swift Technologies Creates Research Drones Tough Enough for Volcanoes

Black Swift Technologies, a Colorado-based designer and manufacturer of unmanned aircraft systems for scientific missions in extreme conditions (Arctic, volcanoes, wildfires, hurricanes), faced chronic version-control headaches with file-based CAD. Engineers using on‑premise SOLIDWORKS struggled to roll back to earlier design iterations, duplicated work, and were forced to maintain special Windows machines just to run CAD.

Moving to cloud-native Onshape gave BST built-in data management with full edit history and “unlimited” undo/redo, Branching and Merging to experiment safely and merge the best ideas, and CAD portability across Linux and other systems. As a result, the team can instantly revert to prior design states, explore more design alternatives without risk, eliminate dedicated high‑end CAD PCs, and streamline collaboration and development.

Black Swift Technologies

Jack Elston

Founder and Chief Executive Officer