Adam, one of the most viral startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has raised a $4.1 million seed round to power its next steps, TechCrunch learned exclusively.
After generating over 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its text-to-3D model app, the AI startup had its pick of investors.
“We were getting term sheets over email without any meetings,” said CEO Zach Dive (on the right of the picture).
Adam quickly went with TQ Ventures as its lead investor because they agreed on the future of computer-aided design (CAD). Just as importantly, they also agreed on Adam’s roadmap — going consumer first, and then to enterprise.
This required the most 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 upcoming copilot for professional-grade CAD workflows.
The startup had always planned to go B2B, but felt that the technology wasn’t enterprise-ready yet — which is why it initially focused on makers, not engineers. But AI models improved faster than they expected, and Adam now plans to launch its copilot by the end of the year, Dive said.
Its initial tool lets creators without CAD skills 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 copilot, we blended in different interaction paradigms; for example, users selecting different parts of the 3D object and conversing with it.”
This will give the startup an element of differentiation compared to other text-to-CAD products, although there is already competition in the ‘AI copilot for CAD’ segment as well. MecAgent, for instance, is already available, but Adam could capitalize on its viral launch.
Early momentum particularly helped with hiring, which is still an ongoing effort, Dive said. He and his cofounder, Adam CPO Aaron Li, both 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 for reasoning in space.”
Capital and endorsements can both help with this endeavor, and Adam now has its fair share of both, sometimes combined. Besides 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).
In addition, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch called Adam “the v0 of CAD” (in a nod to Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation).
“It’s simpler, faster, and reaches a broader audience,” he wrote on X.
Adam is already on its way to reaching a broad audience, with “tens of thousands of individual users and a growing base of paying customers” for its standard and pro plans, which respectively start at $5.99 and $17.99 per month. The startup hasn’t begun to monetize its soon-to-launch enterprise offering, but has “testers validating different features,” Dive said.
This testing phase is clearly necessary: there’s quite a jump from helping amateurs print 3D Pikachus to supporting engineers in their daily work. Dive said the startup doesn’t 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 pro users generate feature‑rich parametric designs in popular CAD programs, beginning with Onshape, which is known for bringing CAD to the cloud and reshaping workflows. “The same thing will be true with AI,” Dive predicted.
