CADDi Co. Ltd. said it has raised $114 million in a Series D round that values the manufacturing artificial intelligence company at $1.2 billion. The Tokyo- and Chicago-based startup plans to direct part of the funding toward expanding in North America, which it describes as the world's second-largest manufacturing market.
CADDi's software is built to unlock information trapped inside manufacturers' engineering drawings. Its CADDi Drawer product, released in 2022, reads blueprints and allows engineers to search archived part designs by shape or specification. Purchasing teams use the same search capability to identify duplicate parts and compare supplier pricing, and more than half of Japan's 100 largest manufacturers are customers.
The company's next-generation Manufacturing AI Data Platform debuted in Japan in August and is now launching in the U.S. CADDi said the data it handles is typically scattered across an organization, because design files, purchase orders and inspection results remain with the teams that created them. The software interprets what those records mean and how they relate, letting staff and AI agents draw from one shared set of data without manual file passing.
CADDi Explorer replaces Drawer as what the company calls a manufacturing discovery engine. CADDi Agent, also new, analyzes data and takes action within each customer's operating context, and six workflow products cover the manufacturing value chain.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Yushiro Kato argued in a company essay that over three decades the world of bits became more than a hundred times faster while the world of atoms largely held its pace across most industries. He wants manufacturing steps that once ran sequentially to run in parallel, and he contends general-purpose AI cannot handle the data involved without domain-specific models. Kato told Fortune he has never seen anyone use large language models for design reviews because the technology does not understand drawings or CAD.
CADDi did not name a lead investor for the round. New backers include Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Woven Capital, the Toyota Motor Corp. venture arm, 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.
Atomico led the previous round, a $38 million Series C extension in March 2025 that carried a $470 million valuation. Since then CADDi's workforce has grown about half, to roughly 900 people, while sales have more than doubled annually. Coreline Ventures partner Ken Hara said AI delivers only where a data layer and semantic layer already exist, and in manufacturing that layer is fragmented and often never digitized. Atomico partner Luca Eisenstecken said CADDi has moved beyond fixing individual workflows to building an intelligence layer for the full manufacturing lifecycle. The company also plans to invest in 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, CADDi said it has raised $234 million in total.
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