CADDi Inc., a Tokyo-based company working to accelerate physical innovation tenfold, has secured 17.7 billion yen in Series D funding from eight new and existing investors. The round values the company at 182 billion yen and brings its cumulative equity funding to 36.31 billion yen. The capital will support the expansion of its manufacturing AI data platform in Japan and the United States.
Funding details and valuation
The new investors are Moore Strategic Ventures, Coreline Ventures, HR Tech Fund, Woven Capital, and Salesforce Ventures, with HR Tech Fund operating under Recruit Holdings. Existing backers Atomico, Globis Capital Partners, and Japan Post Asset Management, through its JPS Growth Investment partnerships, also joined the round. This brings CADDi's cumulative equity funding to 36.31 billion yen and gives the company a valuation of 182 billion yen.
Strategic purpose and use of capital
CADDi believes that as AI advances, the gap between ideas and physical implementation widens, creating what the company calls physical limits. Manufacturing data is complex because the meaning, relationships, and constraints within it cannot be handled by general purpose AI alone. The company will use the new funds mainly for proprietary AI development, platform expansion, global operations in North America, and talent investment.
Platform expansion in Japan and the United States
In August 2026, CADDi introduced its next-generation Manufacturing AI Data Platform, called CADDi, in Japan as a common foundation for people and AI. The platform is designed to give structure to fragmented data and function as a manufacturing operating system. The company has now begun offering the platform in the United States, the world's second-largest manufacturing market, and plans to accelerate its expansion there.
Investor perspectives
Coreline Ventures co-founder Kenichi Hara said the firm has backed CADDi since its early stages and continues to support its manufacturing-specific data platform. Woven Capital's Michiko Kato noted that decades of engineering knowledge remain underused in manufacturing and that CADDi structures this knowledge for practical decisions. Atomico partner Luca Eisenstecken added that CADDi is embedded in advanced manufacturing operations across Japan, the United States, and Europe.
CEO statement
CEO Yushiro Kato published a personal note titled Manufacturing's Resurgence in the AI Era, discussing the growing gap between digital and physical progress. He argued that AI can accelerate thinking but cannot by itself shorten the years needed to mass produce physical goods. The statement positions CADDi's work as an effort to resolve this asymmetry between bits and atoms.
Additional announcements
The company also announced an offline event on September 30 in Tokyo featuring a conversation between the CEO and global investors. It launched a podcast program called CADDi Dialogue with its first episode scheduled for September 16, 2026. CADDi is currently recruiting for multiple roles through its career and new graduate hiring sites.
This series D round strengthens CADDi's position as a unicorn and provides resources to build a vertical AI platform for the manufacturing sector. The company's expansion into the United States and its focus on structuring complex engineering data reflect a broader ambition to make physical innovation faster. With new and existing investors aligned, CADDi aims to turn fragmented manufacturing knowledge into a shared asset for the next generation of industrial AI.