CADDi, a Japanese company that sells AI software for manufacturers' engineering and production data, raised ¥17.7bn (about $114m) in a Series D round, it announced on 15 September 2026. The round valued the company at ¥182bn (about $1.2bn).
Eight new and existing investors took part and no lead was named. The new backers were Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Toyota's Woven Capital and HR Tech Fund, the corporate venture arm of Recruit Holdings. Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and the JPS Growth Investment funds, managed by a Japan Post Bank subsidiary, returned.
The round brought CADDi's total equity funding to ¥36.31bn, which the company put at $234m, according to its release and Fortune. Toyo Keizai reported that ¥10.38bn of the ¥17.7bn was raised in September as the Series D itself; the company's release presents the full amount as the round.
“I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD.”Yushiro Kato, Co-founder and CEO, CADDi (to Fortune)
What CADDi does
CADDi was founded in 2017 by Yushiro Kato, who previously worked at McKinsey and is chief executive, and Aki Kobashi, who previously worked at Apple, SiliconANGLE reported. Its headquarters are in Tokyo's Taito ward, and Fortune described it as based in Tokyo and Chicago.
Its first product, CADDi Drawer, read technical drawings so that buyers could find parts the company had already designed or bought and avoid ordering near-duplicates from different suppliers, Fortune reported. The product has been renamed CADDi Explorer and now sits inside what the company calls an AI data platform for manufacturing, which combines drawings, procurement, production and quality records so that staff and AI agents can work from the same data.
A new generation of the platform launched in Japan in August 2026 and in the US in September; CADDi has sold products in the US since 2023. The line-up also includes CADDi Agent and six workflow products, among them a design review tool that flags likely errors in new drawings based on past problems with similar parts. Kato told Fortune that CADDi uses its own model for drawings and CAD files and general-purpose language models for documents and spreadsheets. "I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD," he said.
Customers and growth
Kato declined to disclose revenue or customer numbers, according to Fortune, but said sales were more than doubling each year and that CADDi had customers in 22 countries. More than half of Japan's 100 largest manufacturers use its software, he said.
Headcount has grown to about 900, up from around 600 in early 2025, Fortune reported. The company employs more than 100 customer success staff, more than its sales team.
What the money is for
CADDi said it will spend the money on four areas: developing its own AI and technology, expanding the platform, building out its global operations with North America as the focus, and hiring and training staff.
Ken Hara of Coreline Ventures, which led CADDi's Series A in 2018 and a further round in 2019 according to the release, said AI only works where a data layer already exists. Luca Eisenstecken, a partner at Atomico, said the company is now building "the intelligence layer for the entire manufacturing lifecycle", SiliconANGLE reported.
The funding so far
CADDi's last round was a $38m Series C extension in March 2025, led by Atomico, at which it reported a $470m valuation, according to SiliconANGLE. The new valuation is more than twice that figure. The release said this was Globis Capital Partners' fourth investment in the company.
Company website: caddi.com