Engineering drawings hold decades of a factory’s knowledge, and most of it stays unreadable to software. CADDi Co. Ltd. has raised $114M in a Series D at a $1.2B valuation to change that, with part of the money going to North American expansion.
Blueprints are the raw material, and the tool that started the company turns one into something searchable. Shape and specification both work as queries against an archive of past part designs inside CADDi Drawer, which shipped in 2022. Purchasing teams lean on the same search to spot duplicate parts and compare what suppliers charge. Customers include more than half of Japan’s 100 largest manufacturers.
A Manufacturing AI Data Platform followed in Japan in August and is now launching in the United States. Design files, purchase orders and inspection results tend to stay with whichever team produced them, so the platform standardizes what those records mean and how they relate, handing staff and AI agents one shared set instead of manual handoffs.
The product line now runs CADDi Explorer as a discovery engine in place of Drawer, CADDi Agent to analyze and act inside a customer’s context, and six workflow products across the manufacturing chain. Chief executive Yushiro Kato, who founded the company in 2017 with former Apple engineer Aki Kobashi, argues general-purpose models cannot handle this data without domain-specific training. He has said he has never seen large language models used for design review, because they do not understand drawings or CAD.
Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Toyota’s Woven Capital joined as new backers alongside Recruit’s HR Tech Fund, with Atomico, Globis and JPS Growth returning. Total raised stands at $234M. Headcount is about 900, up roughly half since the March 2025 Series C extension, while sales have more than doubled each year.
