Yushiro Kato, co-founder and chief executive of CADDi, announced that the Tokyo- and Chicago-based AI startup has closed a $114 million Series D financing round. The new capital pushes the company's valuation to $1.2 billion, more than double the $470 million it reported in March 2025.
Funding round details
The round attracted eight investors, mixing new and existing backers. New participants include Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Woven Capital, the growth-stage fund of Toyota, and the HR Tech Fund, the corporate venture arm of Japan's Recruit Holdings. An additional investor chose to remain unnamed. Existing supporters such as Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and the JPS Growth funds, managed by a subsidiary of Japan Post Bank, also participated. The financing brings CADDi's total funding to $234 million.
Product evolution
Founded in 2017, CADDi first launched a tool called CADDi Drawer, aimed at reducing duplicate part purchases by scanning technical drawings and matching them against a customer's inventory and supplier history. The AI-driven solution also reported defect rates, helping users decide whether to reuse stock, reorder from an existing supplier, or seek a new source.
In the last two years the company has expanded its offering into an "AI data platform for manufacturing". The platform ingests diverse data, from CAD files to ERP and HR systems, and structures it for both human users and AI agents. CADDi Drawer has been rebranded CADDi Explorer and now sits alongside CADDi Agent, an AI assistant that advises on part standardisation and conducts quality impact assessments for design changes.
Six specialised "workflow" products have also been introduced. For example, CADDi Design Review flags likely errors in new drawings by drawing on patterns from previous projects, thereby capturing tacit engineering knowledge that often resides only in experienced staff.
Growth and market impact
"I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD," Kato told EuroHerald.
Kato explained that CADDi combines a proprietary AI model for interpreting engineering data with general-purpose large language models for handling documents and spreadsheets. He noted that over 80 % of manufacturing know-how, such as why a particular supplier was chosen or why a part was designed a certain way, remains undocumented, existing only in the minds of veteran employees. CADDi's platform aims to capture and codify that expertise.
The company declined to reveal exact revenue or customer counts, but said sales are more than doubling year on year and that it now serves clients in 22 countries, with the United States a core focus. In Japan, more than half of the nation's 100 largest manufacturers are reported to use CADDi. Staff numbers have risen to roughly 900, up from 600 in early 2025.
What happens next?
The fresh capital will be directed toward expanding the product suite, building AI models that can directly interpret 3D CAD files and 2D drawings, and accelerating global expansion, particularly in North America. CADDi also plans to hire additional talent to support these initiatives.
According to Kato, the biggest hurdle to wider adoption is change management, convincing workers to alter long-standing processes. To address this, CADDi employs more than 100 customer-success staff, outnumbering its sales team, and has begun hiring "forward-deployed engineers" who help clients integrate AI effectively.
Looking ahead, Kato frames the company's ambition around what he calls the "physical bottleneck". While AI can accelerate thinking dramatically, the physical production cycle for items such as cars still spans several years. CADDi's goal is to cut the time from concept to delivery by tenfold by 2035, aiming for a four- to five-month window for a new vehicle. Achieving this would require parallelising design-review cycles and leveraging the collective expertise of seasoned engineers through AI-enhanced tools.