Adamone of the most viral startups from Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has raised a $4.1 million seed round to fuel its next steps, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
After generating more than 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its text-to-3D model app, the AI startup had its pick of investors.
“We received term sheets via email without any meetings,” said CEO Zach Dive (pictured right).
Adam got used to it quickly TQ Companies as its main investor because they agreed on the future of computer-aided design (CAD). Just as important, they also agreed on Adam’s roadmap: go to the consumer first, then go to the business.
This required the greatest alignment: Adam caught people’s attention with a mainstream product, not an enterprise one. But Dive said this choice is paying off and paving the way for Adam’s next co-pilot for professional-grade CAD workflows.
The startup had always planned to move into B2B, but felt the technology wasn’t ready for the enterprise yet, which is why it initially focused on manufacturers, not engineers. But the AI models improved faster than expected and Adam now plans to launch his co-pilot by the end of the year, Dive said.
Its initial tool allows creators without CAD skills to create 3D models from text prompts, but early feedback showed that text wasn’t always the best way to interact with 3D, Dive said. “So for our co-pilot, we combine different interaction paradigms; for example, users select different parts of the 3D object and converse with it.”
This will give the startup an element of differentiation compared to other text to CAD productsalthough there is already competition in the ‘AI co-pilot for CAD’ segment as well. MechAgentFor example, it’s already available, but Adam could capitalize on its viral release.
The initial push particularly helped with hiring, which is still an ongoing effort, Dive said. He and his co-founder, Adam CPO Aaron Li, graduated from UC Berkeley’s Master of Design program, but the startup also needs more AI and engineering talent to “give models the right context to reason in space.”
Both capital and sponsorships can help in this endeavor, and Adam now has his fair share of both, sometimes combined. 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 a nod to Vercel’s V0an AI-powered platform for web creation).
“It’s simpler, faster and reaches a broader audience,” he said. wrote in X.
Adam is already on track to reach a broad audience, with “tens of thousands of individual users and a growing base of paying customers” for its standard and professional plans, which start at $5.99 and $17.99 per month, respectively. The startup hasn’t started monetizing its upcoming enterprise offering, but it has “testers validating different features,” Dive said.
This testing phase is clearly necessary: there is a big leap between helping fans 3D print Pikachus and supporting engineers in their daily work. Dive said the startup does not intend to replace them, but instead streamlines time-consuming tasks, such as applying the same change to multiple CAD files.
With an initial focus on mechanical engineering, the startup plans to help these professional users generate feature-rich parametric designs in popular CAD programs, starting with Fitknown for bringing CAD to the cloud and reshaping workflows. “The same thing will happen with AI,” Dive predicted.
