CADDi's Valuation More Than Doubles to $1.2 Billion

CADDi raised $114 million in a Series D that values the manufacturing-AI startup at $1.2 billion, Fortune reported Sept. 15 in an exclusive. That is more than double the $470 million valuation CADDi reported in March 2025, and the number Fortune did not get is the one that would say whether the jump is earned: CADDi would not disclose revenue.

What the company did disclose is headcount, and it is the closest available proxy. CADDi had roughly 600 employees in early 2025 and about 900 now, according to Fortune, a 50 percent increase against a valuation that rose 155 percent. Measured against staff rather than revenue, that works out to about $783,000 in valuation per employee in March 2025 and about $1.33 million per employee today. Whether that is a company getting more valuable per person, or a company getting more expensive per person, depends entirely on the revenue figure CADDi is not giving out.

What CADDi sells

Founded in 2017 by Yushiro Kato, a former McKinsey consultant, and Aki Kobashi, a former Apple and Lockheed Martin engineer, CADDi's own announcement of its March 2025 funding describes an AI data platform that turns technical drawings, CAD files and supply-chain records into structured data manufacturers and AI agents can both use. Its products include CADDi Explorer, a similarity search across drawing archives that surfaces historical defect rates; CADDi Agent, which automates standardization and quality decisions; and a Design Review tool that flags errors in engineering drawings. CEO Kato told Fortune the case for the last of those is narrow: "I've never seen anybody who uses LLMs to do design review because it doesn't understand drawings or CAD."

The company's March 2025 round listed customers including Hitachi, Kawasaki, Subaru and Tokyo Electron. Fortune's September reporting puts CADDi in 22 countries, with clients in automotive, electronics and heavy machinery, and says the company now serves more than half of Japan's 100 largest manufacturers.

The investors who joined

Eight investors took part in the Series D, Fortune reported. New backers include Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Woven Capital, Toyota's growth-stage investment fund, and HR Tech Fund, the corporate venture arm of Japan's Recruit Holdings; existing investors Atomico, Globis Capital Partners and the JPS Growth funds, managed by a Japan Post Bank subsidiary, also returned. The round brings CADDi's total funding to $234 million.

The Recruit and Japan Post Bank money points at a domestic thesis alongside the Toyota and Salesforce one: both are Japanese financial and staffing conglomerates betting that a homegrown platform, not an American one, ends up as the default layer between a factory's drawings and its AI tools. That bet only pays off if CADDi keeps its lead in a country where, Fortune reported, more than half of the 100 largest manufacturers are already customers, leaving less room domestically for a rival to repeat the same land grab CADDi just completed.

That is not CADDi's first outside capital by a long way. The March 2025 round it announced on its own site was a $38 million Series C extension led by Atomico, paired with $30 million in debt from Mizuho and other banks, and it valued the company at $470 million by Fortune's separate reporting at the time. Existing investors Global Brain and Minerva Growth doubled down in that round; Arena Holding, DCM, DST Global and World Innovation Lab were earlier backers.

CADDi round	Reported	Amount	Valuation	Employees
Series C extension	Mar. 2025	$38 million	$470 million	About 600
Series D	Sept. 2026	$114 million	$1.2 billion	About 900

1. Mar. 2025470 $ million
2. Sept. 20261200 $ million

Source: Fortune, accessed 2026-09-16

The comparable that cuts the other way

CADDi's jump sits inside a pattern The Terminal has tracked all week: Temporal's valuation rose to $12.55 billion, 2.5 times its February mark, seven months apart, on the strength of usage growth rather than disclosed revenue. Euclyd, a Dutch chipmaker, raised more than €200 million in a round more than double its own target, also led by a strategic industrial investor rather than a pure financial one, Samsung in that case rather than Toyota. In both, as in CADDi's, the number that would let an outsider judge the price, revenue or comparable unit economics, was withheld.

The counter-case is that CADDi's investor list is not purely financial. Woven Capital exists to find manufacturing-technology bets for Toyota specifically, and Salesforce Ventures rarely writes checks without a product thesis tied to Salesforce's own roadmap. Their presence is evidence, even without a number, that people who audit manufacturing software for a living looked at CADDi's books and signed off at $1.2 billion. That is not the same as a disclosed multiple, but it is not nothing either.

What would change that read is CADDi's own growth claim going unverified for another funding cycle. The company told Fortune sales are "doubling year over year," a figure it did not attach to a base. If the next round, whenever it comes, still cannot produce a revenue number, the valuation-per-employee math is the only yardstick outsiders will have, and it will have kept climbing on headcount alone.