Strategic partnership: CARAT acquires stake in software engineering specialist CMC-Kiesel GmbH

The software company CARAT, part of the MHK Group, has taken a strategic stake in CMC-Kiesel GmbH. The Hechingen-based company specializes in customized solutions in the areas of 3D and CAD-based data as well as virtual and augmented reality. CMC-Kiesel GmbH employs more than 25 highly qualified employees.

"We have already worked very successfully with the team at CMC-Kiesel in recent years on various developments for our professional kitchen planning software," said CARAT Managing Director Alexander Graf. "The importance of visualizing virtual spaces is constantly increasing. With our solution 'CARAT emotion' we already offer lifelike and emotional representations of surfaces and animated scenes. We have also realized our first artificial intelligence demonstrations with CARAT labs. The strategic partnership with CMC-Kiesel enables us to drive these innovative developments even more intensively."

Markus Kiesel, founder and managing director of CMC-Kiesel GmbH, highlights the new opportunities that are opening up: "We always develop our visualization solutions in line with the specific requirements of concrete use cases. The kitchen product with its numerous and complex elements requires an attractive and experience-oriented implementation in the consulting and planning process. We can contribute our expertise optimally here and look forward to working even more intensively with CARAT in the future."

"The team at CMC-Kiesel has impressive expertise in the field of software engineering and we are delighted to be able to use this expertise to expand our digital ecosystem," explained Thorsten Hallermeier, Chief Digital Officer of the MHK Group. "After a successful phase as a development partner, we can now enter into a strategic partnership with our significant stake and work in close consultation on an innovation pipeline. From MHK's perspective, this is a clear commitment to invest in the further development of CARAT's planning and visualization solutions. In this way, we support our partners in the specialized kitchen trade in two important areas: on the one hand, we analyze future technologies with a view to how they can be used wisely and with added value in the consulting and planning process with our solutions. Second, we continuously optimize the specific consulting and planning situation in local kitchen stores. In this way, we make a concrete contribution to customer contact and the quality of advice."