Manufacturing artificial intelligence startup CADDi Co. Ltd. today announced it has raised $114 million in new funding at a valuation of $1.2 billion. The company plans to use part of the money to expand in North America.

CADDi builds software that lets manufacturers put the information locked inside their engineering drawings to work. CADDi Drawer, released in 2022, reads blueprints and lets engineers search archived part designs by shape or specification. Purchasing teams use the same search to catch duplicate parts and check what suppliers charge, and more than half of Japan’s 100 largest manufacturers are now customers.

A new generation of the company’s Manufacturing AI Data Platform debuted in Japan in August and is now launching in the U.S., which CADDi calls the world’s second-largest manufacturing market. Most of the data it handles is scattered across the business, since design files, purchase orders and inspection results tend to stay with whichever team created them. CADDi said the software sorts out what those records mean and how they relate. Staff and AI agents then pull from one common set, with nobody passing files along by hand.

CADDi Explorer succeeds Drawer as what the company calls a manufacturing discovery engine. CADDi Agent, also new, analyzes the data and acts on it inside each customer’s operating context, while six workflow products span the manufacturing value chain.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Yushiro Kato laid out the case for the platform in a recent essay on the company’s website. Over three decades, he wrote, “we made the world of bits more than a hundred times faster” while the world of atoms kept roughly the same pace in most industries. Kato wants manufacturing steps that once ran one after another to run in parallel, and he argues that general-purpose AI can’t handle the data involved without domain-specific models.

He was blunter with Fortune. “I’ve never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design reviews because it doesn’t understand drawings or CAD,” Kato told the publication.

CADDi did not name a lead investor for the Series D round. Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Toyota Motor Corp.’s Woven Capital came in as new backers, as did HR Tech Fund, a corporate venture vehicle owned by Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd. Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and JPS Growth Investment Limited Partnership returned from earlier rounds.

Atomico led the most recent of those, a $38 million Series C extension in March 2025 at which CADDi reported a $470 million valuation. Since that deal, CADDi’s workforce has grown by about half to roughly 900 people while its sales have been more than doubling each year.

“AI only delivers where a data layer and a semantic layer already exist,” said Ken Hara, a partner at Coreline Ventures. “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.”

Luca Eisenstecken, a partner at Atomico, said CADDi has moved past fixing individual workflows and is now building “the intelligence layer for the entire manufacturing lifecycle.” Along with the North American expansion, the company plans to put the funding into its own AI technology, further platform development and hiring.

Kato had worked at McKinsey & Co., and it was with Aki Kobashi, a former Apple Inc. employee, that he founded CADDi in 2017. The company, which now splits its headquarters between Tokyo and Chicago, said it has raised $234 million in all with the Series D included.

Image: CADDi