Insider Brief
- CADDi, a manufacturing AI data platform headquartered in Chicago and Tokyo, raised $114 million in Series D funding at a $1.2 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $234 million, with new investors including Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
- CEO Yushiro Kato framed the raise around closing the gap between AI’s speed of thought and the slower pace of physical manufacturing, positioning CADDi’s platform as a shared semantic data layer connecting engineering, procurement, production and quality across human and AI workflows.
- Funds will support proprietary AI development, expansion of the platform, growth of North American operations, and talent investment, alongside new products including CADDi Explorer and the CADDi Agent as the company launches fully into the US market.
PRESS RELEASE — CADDi, the global technology company that develops the CADDi Manufacturing AI Data Platform, announced that it has entered into definitive agreements for $114 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in Series D funding, with eight new and existing investors participating, including Moore Strategic Ventures and Coreline Ventures. This funding brings CADDi’s total funding to $234 million.
Funding overview:
- Series D Round Size: $114 million
- New Investors: Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, HR Tech Fund LLC*, Woven Capital, and Salesforce Ventures
- Existing Investors: Atomico, Globis Capital Partners, JPS Growth Investment Limited Partnership**
Fueling what’s next for manufacturing in the AI era
CADDi is headquartered in Chicago and Tokyo, and is led by Yushiro Kato, co-founder and CEO. In an essay recently published on CADDi’s corporate website, titled “Materialization — Making Things in the Age of AI,”Kato wrote, “Over thirty years we made the world of bits more than a hundred times faster. The world of atoms moved at roughly the same speed in most industries. In the AI era, the gap widens further. Even if AI makes thinking ten thousand times faster and produces ten thousand times the theory, the upside from AI gets diluted in the physical world if it still takes four years to mass-produce cars. Solving physical limits means solving this asymmetry.”
Kato believes the key lies in transitioning manufacturing from sequential execution to parallel processing. In a world where processes that were once executed step-by-step now run simultaneously, a common platform that enables humans and AI across departments to draw on the same information and context becomes indispensable. However, manufacturing data contains highly complex semantics, relationships, and constraints that general-purpose AI cannot adequately address. Domain-specific vertical AI capable of mapping data semantics is essential.
The funds raised will be allocated across four areas:
- Proprietary AI and technology development
- Expansion of the Manufacturing AI Data Platform
- Enhancement of global business operations centered on North America
- Investment in talent acquisition and development
“AI only delivers where a data layer and a semantic layer already exist. In manufacturing that layer is buried in information fragmented across departments and in records that were never digitized at all, which is why horizontal tooling never reaches it,” said Ken Hara, partner at Coreline Ventures. “CADDi has spent four years building it, with some of the most demanding manufacturers in the world as its first customers. Knowledge that lived only in individual experience is becoming an asset the organization, and in time the industry, can use.”
“Eighteen months ago, we backed CADDi because we believed they had the potential to build one of the defining AI companies in manufacturing. Since then, that conviction has only grown,” said Luca Eisenstecken, Partner at Atomico. “CADDi is evolving from solving individual manufacturing workflows to building the intelligence layer for the entire manufacturing lifecycle. Its new AI-native data platform connects engineering, procurement, production and quality through a shared semantic data foundation, giving AI agents the context to reason across decades of fragmented manufacturing knowledge. The ambition is enormous, the execution has been exceptional and we’re thrilled to deepen our partnership with Yushiro, Aki and the team for the decade ahead.”
CADDi previews next-generation platform technology
Kato emphasized, “As artificial intelligence pushes past the boundaries of intelligence, the gap between what is conceptualized and what is implemented in the physical world widens. We see this as a broader human challenge that goes well beyond manufacturing: ‘physical limits.’”
CADDi announced the next-generation Manufacturing AI Data Platform in Japan in August 2026 to serve as this foundational platform, initiating the global products release. “At our CADDi Unleash 2026 event, we presented a renewed vision: to overcome physical limits and accelerate physical innovation tenfold. That is our priority from here on, and this commitment is what guided both our recent product rebrand and the development of new products we are bringing to our U.S. customers,” said Kato.
Designed as a manufacturing operating system, CADDi provides a semantic structure to fragmented data, enabling human and AI workflows to run on shared data without manual handoffs. The new product, CADDi Explorer, is a manufacturing discovery engine and the next-generation version of CADDi Drawer. CADDi Agent is a new AI agent that analyzes manufacturing data, makes decisions, and takes action within each company’s operating context. CADDi will also offer six domain-specific Workflow Products spanning the manufacturing value chain, enhancing decision-making and execution to drive business-critical impact.
The platform’s official U.S. launch signals CADDi’s full-scale expansion into the United States, the world’s second-largest manufacturing market.
About CADDi
CADDi is a global manufacturing technology company driven by the vision to accelerate physical innovation tenfold. Headquartered in Chicago and Tokyo, the company was founded in 2017 by industry veterans Yushiro Kato and Aki Kobashi, formerly of McKinsey and Apple, respectively. CADDi currently serves manufacturing businesses in more than 20 countries, including many of the largest publicly traded companies in Japan and the United States. Total funding stands at $234 million, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.
CADDi’s Manufacturing AI Data Platform analyzes, structures, contextualizes, and connects data that has historically been fragmented across the manufacturing value chain. With a proprietary AI model, CADDi offers domain-specific Workflow Products spanning the manufacturing value chain, enhancing decision-making and execution to drive business-critical impact. To learn more, visit caddi.com.
View digital copy of this release, including a full list of investor comments on CADDi’s news page: caddi.com/en-us/news
*HR Tech Fund LLC is a corporate venture capital entity under Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd.
**JPS Growth Investment Limited Partnership and JPS Growth II Investment Limited Partnership, managed by a subsidiary of Japan Post Bank Asset Management Co., Ltd.
Contacts
Media Contact
Milbien Medina
Senior Manager, Brand Marketing at CADDi
milbien_medina@caddi.com
