CADDi's $1.2bn Series D prices eighteen months of doubling sales

CADDi, a startup selling AI software to help manufacturers organize and use engineering and production data, raised $114 million in a Series D funding round valuing the company at $1.2 billion; it is based in Tokyo and Chicago.

Eight new and existing investors took part in the round, and one new investor was not identified.

New participants include Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Toyota's growth-stage fund Woven Capital, and HR Tech Fund, the corporate venture arm of Japan's Recruit Holdings.

Kato said proceeds will go toward expanding the product lineup, building AI models that understand manufacturing-specific data such as 3D CAD files and 2D drawings, global expansion centered on North America, and hiring.

CADDi Drawer has been renamed CADDi Explorer and is joined by CADDi Agent, and the company has launched six workflow products aimed at specific tasks, including CADDi Design Review.

Fortune reported the round on 15 September 2026.

The $1.2 billion valuation is more than double the $470 million CADDi reported in March 2025.

Kato declined to disclose revenue or customer numbers, but said sales are more than doubling year over year and that the company has customers in 22 countries, with the U.S. a core focus.

In Japan, more than half of the country's 100 largest manufacturers use CADDi, Kato said.

CADDi's headcount has grown to about 900 staffers, up from 600 in early 2025.

Kato said the biggest obstacle to adoption is change management, and CADDi employs more than 100 customer success staff, outnumbering its salespeople; like many AI companies it has started hiring forward deployed engineers.

"The goal is to change the organization and create a business impact," Kato said.

"I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD," Kato said.

CADDi uses its own proprietary AI model to analyze product data such as drawings and CAD files, and general-purpose large language models for documents and spreadsheets.

CADDi markets its products on measurable returns to customers, such as lower direct material costs or shorter engineering lead times, which Kato said is critical for automakers and other manufacturers competing with Chinese rivals.

The $114 million round is about 49 percent of the $234 million CADDi has raised in total.

CADDi had raised about $120 million before this round.

The $114 million is about 9.5 percent of the $1.2 billion post-money valuation.

The valuation rose 2.55 times, from $470 million in March 2025 to $1.2 billion as reported on 15 September 2026, a span of about eighteen months.

Total capital raised is about $260,000 per employee at a headcount of about 900.

More than 100 customer success staff is about 11 percent of a headcount of about 900.

Headcount rose 50 percent, an increase of 300 people, over the same eighteen months in which sales are said to have grown at least 180 percent.

More than 80% of the knowledge about manufacturing work processes, including why a company chose a supplier or designed a part a certain way, is never recorded anywhere and exists in the heads of experienced employees, Kato said.

Sales more than doubling every twelve months compounds to at least 2.8 times over eighteen months, above the 2.55 times increase in valuation, so the price paid per unit of revenue did not rise.