CADDi valued at $1.2 billion after $114 million Series D

CADDi's first product, CADDi Drawer, attacked a specific and unglamorous problem: manufacturers buy too many similar parts from different suppliers. The software ingested technical drawings, searched a customer's own databases for similar or identical parts it had already bought or held in inventory, and reported those parts' defect rates so the customer could choose to use existing stock, repurchase from an existing supplier, or try a new one. Over the past two years the company broadened that into what it calls an "AI data platform for manufacturing," integrating data from CAD files, enterprise resource planning software and HR systems so both people and AI agents can use it. Drawer became CADDi Explorer, joined by CADDi Agent and six task-specific "workflow" products.

That expansion rests on a claim CEO Yushiro Kato makes about where manufacturing knowledge actually lives. More than 80% of the knowledge about manufacturing work processes — and often why a company chose a particular supplier or designed a part a particular way — is never recorded anywhere, he said; it exists in the heads of experienced employees. CADDi's platform is built to capture and codify it, partly through products designed to absorb the tacit knowledge of veteran engineers and workers. Kato's essay frames the ambition as breaking "the physical bottleneck": AI capabilities are compounding, he argues, yet a new car still takes about four years from planning to delivery, so the upside gets diluted in the physical world.

The money from this round is earmarked for expanding the product lineup, building AI models that understand manufacturing-specific data such as 3D CAD files and 2D drawings, global expansion centered on North America, and hiring. Kato said sales are more than doubling year over year, that customers now span 22 countries, and that in Japan more than half of the country's 100 largest manufacturers use CADDi — but he declined to disclose revenue or customer numbers, so how much of that reach converts into durable revenue is not visible from outside. Reading the valuation as a bet on the platform's staying power, the outcome appears to hinge on whether CADDi's customer success and "forward deployed engineer" model can keep overcoming change management at the organizations it sells into.