Our investment in CADDi: the AI data platform transforming manufacturing
With tariffs, trade agreements and taxes top of the news agenda, manufacturing businesses globally are under enormous pressure to create efficiencies and lower costs.
AI tooling should provide the answer. Yet industry confidence in the unstructured data layers feeding existing AI models remains low - unsurprising given the software systems built to support this industry are now 30 to 40 years out of date. As a result, essential data is siloed across multiple legacy software solutions and the physical world, lacking contextual enrichment - particularly with valuable supply chain data. Without usable, structured data, these AI initiatives are bound to fail.
CADDi, founded in Tokyo in 2017 by industry heavyweights Yushiro Kato and Aki Kobashi after major roles at Apple, Lockheed Martin and McKinsey, provides the painkiller solution to this vast problem that plagues companies across the globe.
The firm started life as a manufacturing marketplace and attracted investors like Arena Holding, DCM, DST Global, Globis Capital and World Innovation Lab. Three years ago, CADDi launched an AI data platform for manufacturing companies amid massive customer demand. Since then, the company has scaled their software platform rapidly to hundreds of customers, landing household names such as Hitachi, Kawasaki, Subaru, and Tokyo Electron.
We have seen tremendous demand from global companies for our software platform due to the tangible, immediate ROI we can provide them with, turbocharging their AI-driven operational transformations. Some of our product use cases, like similarity search of historical technical drawing data, are not only highly valuable standalone but are the natural insertion point to build further deeply integrated, workflow based modules on top, like the quotation product for procurement teams we recently launched.
Many large enterprises are used to operating in silos with communication restricted to infrequent cross-team meetings and endless email chains. Engineering, procurement and sales teams all work with different software packages and communicate manually. Enterprise teams store and record a vast amount of data across CAD, PLM and ERP tools but have few ways to consistently structure and unify it. Custom connections can be built between tools but these are costly to create and even more costly to maintain, meaning most enterprises leave data siloed. Functions like part search by type or material are not supported by most tools today - reliance is mostly on institutional knowledge trapped in the heads of tenured employees, leaving those global companies highly exposed and vulnerable. Many organizations end up adding point solutions to support these frequently-used functions given existing legacy tooling is insufficient, which ends up further complicating this issue.
CADDi’s manufacturing intelligence layer is consumed as an AI-enabled search engine that tackles a plethora of use cases. One example is to optimise parts pricing through a similarity search of historical technical drawings to find pricing inconsistencies. Given that for an average customer, one project typically involves over 10,000 individual technical drawings, both time savings for employees and cost savings through optimised negotiation position in the procurement process, as well as ability to find alternative suppliers on a part level linked to the actual technical drawings, is both immediate and almost immeasurably high.
What this also means in practice, is that CADDi is enabling a “shift left” paradigm in manufacturing, which we saw play out in software development several years ago, allowing customers to identify problems earlier on in the manufacturing value chain to prevent potentially costly issues from ever even occurring downstream. This proactive (vs reactive) approach ultimately results in lower cost of production, and less time spent by the manufacturer to create a higher quality product for the end customer. In order to support this change, CADDi are deeply embedding their proprietary AI engine and models into customer tech stacks turning scattered and unstructured data - across all formats - into long term assets, creating a compounding source of value within their customer organisations.
CADDi, in a nutshell, is turning static, outdated and costly, but highly entrenched, legacy software solutions into dynamic systems of insights and enablement and as a result, is slated to become the global de-facto manufacturing system of record long term.
The problem CADDi is solving is vast. Their AI data platform is the gold-standard and transforming the manufacturing industry, serving as the high-octane rocket fuel propelling some of the world’s largest companies toward unprecedented operational efficiency and excellence. Despite having grown to real scale at growth rates in the top decile compared to the best benchmarks in the software space globally, the team around Yushiro and Aki are so far only scratching the surface of this generational market opportunity, all while exhibiting best-in-class unit economics, efficiency and retention metrics.
With rapid onboarding of major customers, CADDi has been able to grow their software platform at outsized velocity, far exceeding the typical best-in-class T2D3 growth benchmark for SaaS companies. Atomico is excited to lead the firm’s $38M Series C Extension financing, to enable the firm to continue its global expansion in the US, Europe and beyond.
