CADDi raises $114M at $1.2B valuation to bring manufacturing AI to North America

CADDi Drawer, released in 2022, reads blueprints and allows engineers to search archived part designs by shape or specification. Purchasing teams use the same search to catch duplicate parts and check what suppliers charge. More than half of Japan's 100 largest manufacturers are now customers.

A new generation of its Manufacturing AI Data Platform debuted in Japan in August and is now launching in the U.S., which CADDi calls the world's second-largest manufacturing market. The company says most data it handles is scattered across design files, purchase orders and inspection results that stay with the teams that created them. CADDi sorts out what those records mean and how they relate, so staff and AI agents can pull from one common set without passing files by hand.

CADDi Explorer succeeds Drawer as what the company calls a manufacturing discovery engine. CADDi Agent, also new, analyzes data and acts on it inside each customer's operating context. Six workflow products span the manufacturing value chain.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Yushiro Kato argued in a recent essay that over three decades "we made the world of bits more than a hundred times faster" while the world of atoms kept roughly the same pace in most industries. He wants manufacturing steps that once ran one after another to run in parallel, and he argues general-purpose AI cannot handle the data involved without domain-specific models. Kato was blunter with Fortune. "I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD," he told the publication.

New backers in the Series D include Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Toyota Motor Corp.'s Woven Capital and HR Tech Fund, a corporate venture vehicle owned by Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd. Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and JPS Growth Investment Limited Partnership returned from earlier rounds. Atomico led the most recent earlier round, a $38 million Series C extension in March 2025 at which CADDi reported a $470 million valuation.

Since that deal, CADDi's workforce has grown by about half to roughly 900 people, while its sales have more than doubled each year. Ken Hara, a partner at Coreline Ventures, said "AI only delivers where a data layer and a semantic layer already exist," and that in manufacturing that layer is buried in information fragmented across departments and in records that were never digitized at all. Luca Eisenstecken, a partner at Atomico, said CADDi has moved past fixing individual workflows and is now building "the intelligence layer for the entire manufacturing lifecycle."

Along with North American expansion, CADDi plans to put the funding into its own AI technology, further platform development and hiring. Kato, a former McKinsey & Co. employee, founded CADDi in 2017 with Aki Kobashi, a former Apple Inc. employee. Including the Series D, the company said it has raised $234 million.