CADDi

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AI models remains low - unsurprising given the software systems built to support this industry are now 30 to 40 years out of date.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. 

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 grown their platform to include household name customers such as Hitachi, Kawasaki, Subaru, and Tokyo Electron.

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. 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.

CADDi’s manufacturing intelligence layer is 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, CADDi saves time for employees and costs through an optimised negotiation position in the procurement process, as well as ability to find alternative suppliers.

With rapid onboarding of major customers, CADDi has been able to grow their software platform at outsized velocity,  continuing its global expansion in the US, Europe and beyond.