Adam, one of the most talked-about startups from Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has raised $4.1 million in a seed round to take its next step, TechCrunch exclusively reported.
The AI startup picked investors after generating more than 10 million social media impressions with the release of its text-to-3D model app.
CEO Zach Dive (pictured right) said:
Agreeing on the future of computer-aided design (CAD), Adam quickly hired TQ Ventures as a lead investor. Just as importantly, they also agreed with Adam’s roadmap: consumer first, enterprise second.
This required the most adjustment. Adam caught people’s attention with a mainstream product, not an enterprise product. But Dive said the choice is paying off, paving the way for Adam to become the next co-pilot in charge of professional CAD workflows.
The startup had always planned to move into B2B, but felt the technology wasn’t ready for enterprises yet. That’s why we initially focused on manufacturers rather than engineers. But the AI model improved faster than expected, and Adam now plans to launch Co-Pilot by the end of the year, Dive said.
While early tools allow creators without CAD skills to create 3D models from text prompts, Dive said early feedback indicated that text wasn’t always the best way to interact with 3D. “So in our co-pilot, we blended different interaction paradigms, such as the user selecting different parts of a 3D object and having a conversation with it.”
This gives the startup a differentiating factor compared to other Text-to-CAD products, but there is already competition in the “AI co-pilot for CAD” segment as well. For example, MecAgent is already available, but Adam could take advantage of its viral launch.
Dive said the early momentum particularly helped with hiring, but this is an ongoing effort. He and his co-founder Adam CPO Aaron Lee are both graduates of UC Berkeley’s Master of Design program, but the startup also needs more AI and engineering talent to “give models the right context for inference in space.”
Both capital and endorsements have helped in this effort, and Adam now has a significant share of both, and in some cases a combination. In addition to TQ and participating funds 468 Capital, Pioneer, Script Capital, and Transpose Platform, Adam is also backed by angel investors including Tim Glaser (Posthog), Trevor Blackwell (YC), and Theo Browne (T3 Chat).
Additionally, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch called Adam “the v0 of CAD” (in honor of Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation).
“It’s simpler, faster and reaches a wider audience,” he wrote of X.
Adam is already on its way to reaching a broader audience with “tens of thousands of individual users and a growing paying customer base” with Standard and Pro plans starting at $5.99 and $17.99 per month. The company has not yet started monetizing its upcoming enterprise product, but “testers are validating various features,” Dive said.
This testing phase is clearly necessary. It’s quite a jump from helping amateurs print 3D Pikachu to supporting engineers with their daily tasks. Dive says the startup doesn’t intend to replace them, but to streamline time-consuming tasks such as applying the same changes to multiple CAD files.
The startup will initially focus on mechanical engineering, bringing CAD to the cloud and helping these professional users generate feature-rich parametric designs in popular CAD programs, including Onshape, which is known for re-engineering workflows. “The same is true for AI,” Dive predicted.
