YC alum Adam raises $4.1M to turn viral text-to-3D tool into AI copilot
Adamone 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 has learned exclusively.
After generating more than 10 million impressions on social media with the launch of its text-to-3D modeling app, the AI startup was able to take its pick of investors.
“We received term sheets via email without any meetings,” says CEO Zach Dive (right in photo above).
Adam quickly joined in TQ companies as lead investor because they agreed on the future of computer-aided design (CAD). Just as importantly, they also agreed on Adam’s roadmap: consumer first, business second.
This required the most coordination: Adam got people’s attention with a mainstream product, not a corporate one. But Dive says the choice is paying off and paving the way for Adam’s upcoming co-pilot for professional CAD workflows.
The startup had always planned to go B2B, but felt the technology was not yet business-ready. That’s why the company initially focused on makers and not engineers. But AI models improved faster than they expected, and Adam now plans to launch his copilot by the end of the year, Dive said.
The first tool allows makers 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 combined different interaction paradigms; for example, users select different parts of the 3D object and talk to them.”
This gives the startup an element of differentiation compared to other text-to-CAD productsalthough there is already competition in the “AI copilot for CAD” segment. MecAgentfor example, is already available, but Adam could benefit from its viral launch.
The early momentum has especially helped with hiring, which is still an ongoing effort, Dive said. He and his co-founder, Adam CPO Aaron Li, 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 reasoning in space.”
Capital and endorsements can both help in this endeavor, and Adam now has a 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 V0, an AI-powered web creation platform).
“It’s easier, faster and reaches a wider audience,” he says wrote on X.
Adam is already on his way to reaching a broad audience, with “tens of thousands of individual users and a growing number of paying customers” for his Standard and Pro plans, which start at $5.99 and $17.99 per month, respectively. The startup hasn’t yet started monetizing its soon-to-launch enterprise offering, but has “testers validating various features,” according to Dive.
This testing phase is clearly necessary: there is quite a leap from helping amateurs print 3D Pikachus to supporting engineers in their daily work. Dive said the startup doesn’t plan 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 versatile parametric designs in popular CAD programs, starting with Onshape, known for bringing CAD to the cloud and reshaping workflows. “The same will be true with AI,” Dive predicted.
