The round
CADDi, a manufacturing software company based in Tokyo and Chicago, has raised ¥17.7bn in a Series D round at a valuation of ¥182bn, it said in a Japanese announcement on 15 September. Its English release puts those figures at $114m and $1.2bn, and total funding to date at $234m.
New investors are Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Recruit Holdings’ HR Tech Fund, Woven Capital and Salesforce Ventures. Existing backers Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and a Japan Post Bank-linked growth fund also took part.
CADDi says it will spend the money on developing its own AI and technology, expanding its platform, growing its business outside Japan with a focus on North America, and hiring.
What CADDi sells
The company, founded in 2017 by chief executive Yushiro Kato and Aki Kobashi, formerly of Apple, builds what it calls a Manufacturing AI Data Platform. It connects design drawings, quotes and production records that usually sit in separate departments. Its products include CADDi Explorer, a search engine for that data, CADDi Agent, an AI agent for decisions, and six products for specific workflows. It says it serves manufacturers in more than 20 countries.
Kato told Fortune why the niche is hard for general AI tools to enter: “I’ve never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn’t understand drawings or CAD.” Fortune reports the company has about 900 employees and that its sales are more than doubling year on year.
“AI only delivers where a data layer and semantic layer already exist,” said Ken Hara, a partner at Coreline Ventures, pointing to how fragmented manufacturing data is.
Why it matters
Industrial companies hold decades of drawings and production data that general AI tools struggle to read. CADDi is betting that owning that data layer is worth more than the model on top of it. Its push into North America, with Salesforce Ventures among its new backers, is the next thing to watch: whether it can win large manufacturers there as it says it has in Japan.
