CADDi raises $114M at $1.2B valuation to bring manufacturing AI to North America
SiliconANGLE Duncan Riley ● Covered by 5 sources
CADDi just raised $114M at a $1.2B valuation to push its manufacturing AI into North America. It reads blueprints and ties messy factory records together, not just chatbots.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Duncan Riley — read the original for the full story.
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CADDi has landed a $114 million Series D round at a $1.2 billion valuation, and the company wants a chunk of that money pointed straight at North America. The startup is betting that manufacturers outside Japan will pay for software that can make sense of engineering drawings, supplier data and inspection records without the usual human shuffling of files between teams.
That pitch is already working at home. CADDi says more than half of Japan’s 100 largest manufacturers use its software. The product that opened the door, CADDi Drawer, arrived in 2022 and lets engineers search old part designs by shape or specification. Procurement teams use the same system to spot duplicate parts and compare supplier prices. Now the company is rolling out its newer Manufacturing AI Data Platform in the U.S., which it calls the world’s second-largest manufacturing market.
The platform story is the real one here. CADDi says manufacturing data is usually scattered because different teams keep their own design files, purchase orders and inspection results. Its software is built to sort out what those records mean and how they connect, then let staff and AI agents work from one shared set instead of moving documents around by hand. CADDi Explorer replaces Drawer as the company’s “manufacturing discovery engine,” while CADDi Agent is meant to analyze data and act inside a customer’s operating context.
Investors are buying that vision. The round had no named lead, but it added Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Toyota Motor Corp.’s Woven Capital and Recruit Holdings’ HR Tech Fund, while Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and JPS Growth Investment Limited Partnership came back in. Atomico had led a $38 million Series C extension in March 2025, when CADDi said it was valued at $470 million. Since then, the company says headcount has grown to about 900 and sales have more than doubled each year. CADDi was founded in 2017 by Yushiro Kato, who had worked at McKinsey, and Aki Kobashi, a former Apple employee. It now splits its headquarters between Tokyo and Chicago and says it has raised $234 million in total.
Kato’s argument is simple enough: general-purpose AI is not built for drawings, CAD files and the stubborn mess of industrial data. He wants manufacturing work that used to happen one step at a time to happen in parallel. That is a cleaner pitch than the usual AI wallpaper, and in factories, cleaner usually gets budget.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
CADDi is making the right bet: factories don’t need another chat window, they need software that understands drawings, parts and procurement without playing dumb. The bigger pattern is obvious and a little embarrassing for generic AI hype — the money follows the systems that know the job, not the models that know everything and nothing at once.
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