Topology optimization is still a new and emerging technology and it's viewed somewhat as an exotic engineering technique. Most software vendors recognize this and figure it makes better business sense to charge exorbitant prices to major players while focusing on their core products elsewhere. Also these vendors have been in the business of selling software directly, rather than as a service, for nearly half a century now and have yet to enter into the software as a service market. It remains to be seen how willing or able these companies will be to pivot to a software as a service model, especially given the size and age of their codebases. (Ansys was designed for punchcards!)
Also, yes, we do go about solving things pretty differently from existing players. Other solutions use very old, very large finite element solvers which were never really intended for this sort of thing in the first place. Our discrete finite difference approach allows us to make a lot of performance optimizations and iterate very rapidly through the search space. For example, we don't need to remesh each iteration and we can also look more directly at the nature of the search space, letting us make better decisions about where to traverse.
Also, yes, we do go about solving things pretty differently from existing players. Other solutions use very old, very large finite element solvers which were never really intended for this sort of thing in the first place. Our discrete finite difference approach allows us to make a lot of performance optimizations and iterate very rapidly through the search space. For example, we don't need to remesh each iteration and we can also look more directly at the nature of the search space, letting us make better decisions about where to traverse.