CADDi raises $114 million at $1.2 billion valuation for US push

CADDi was founded in 2017 by Yushiro Kato, a former McKinsey & Co. staffer, and Aki Kobashi, a former Apple Inc. employee. It now splits its headquarters between Tokyo and Chicago. Its first product, CADDi Drawer, arrived in 2022, and the company says more than half of Japan's 100 largest manufacturers are now customers. Sales have been more than doubling each year, and its workforce has grown by about half to roughly 900 people since the March 2025 Series C extension.

The new platform reorganizes data that design files, purchase orders and inspection results have kept in separate teams. CADDi says its software sorts out what those records mean and how they relate, letting staff and AI agents pull from one common set instead of passing files by hand. CADDi Explorer succeeds Drawer as a manufacturing discovery engine, CADDi Agent analyzes the data and acts on it inside each customer's operating context, and six workflow products span the manufacturing value chain.

Kato has argued that general-purpose AI cannot handle the data involved without domain-specific models, telling Fortune he has never seen anybody use LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD. The test for the U.S. launch, which CADDi calls the world's second-largest manufacturing market, now hinges on whether the domestic customer base and sales momentum carry over to a market where buyer behavior may differ. Atomico's Luca Eisenstecken and Coreline Ventures' Ken Hara have framed the opportunity as building the intelligence layer for the entire manufacturing lifecycle, a bet that depends on how quickly manufacturers digitize records they never captured. The company plans to put the funding into its own AI technology, further platform development and hiring, alongside the North American expansion.