YC alumnus Adam raises $4.1M to turn viral 3D text-to-copier tool into an AI co-pilot

Adam, one of the most hyped startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, has raised a $4.1 million seed round to support its next steps, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

After generating more than 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its 3D text-to-model app, the AI ​​startup has landed a select group of investors.

“We were receiving term papers via email without any meetings,” said CEO Zach Dive (right in photo).

Adam soon turned to TQ Ventures as a lead investor because they agreed on the future of computer-aided design (CAD). Just as importantly, they also agreed on Adam’s roadmap, which was to go consumer first, then enterprise.

This requires the greatest amount of alignment: 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’s next co-pilot for a professional-level CAD workflow.

The startup had always planned to go B2B, but felt the technology wasn’t ready for enterprise use 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 Copilot by the end of the year, Dave said.

Dave said his initial tool allows creators without computer-aided design skills to create 3D models from text prompts, but early feedback showed that text wasn’t always the best way to interact with 3D. “For the co-pilot, we have integrated different interaction models; for example, users select different parts of the 3D object and talk to it.”

This will give the startup an element of differentiation compared to text-to-CAD conversion products, although there is already competition in the “AI co-pilot for CAD” segment as well. For example, MecAgent is already available, but Adam could benefit from a more widespread release.

Early momentum has especially helped with recruiting, which remains an ongoing effort, Dave said. He and his co-founder, Adam CPO Aaron Lee, graduated from UC Berkeley’s master’s in design program, but the startup also needs more AI and engineering talent to “give the models the right context for thinking about space.”

Capital and endorsements can help in this endeavor, and Adam now has his fair share of both, sometimes combined. Alongside 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’s founder, Guillermo Rauch, called Adam the “v0 of CAD” (referring to Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation).

“It’s simpler, faster and reaches a wider audience,” he wrote on X.

Adam is already on track to reach a wide audience, with “tens of thousands of individual users and a growing base of paying customers” for his Standard and Pro plans, which respectively start at $5.99 and $17.99 per month. The startup has not yet started monetizing its soon-to-be-launched enterprise offering, but it has “testers validating different features,” Dave said.

This testing phase is clearly essential: there is a big jump from helping hobbyists 3D print Pikachu to supporting engineers in their daily work. Dive said the startup doesn’t intend to replace it, but is instead working to simplify time-consuming tasks like applying the same change to multiple CAD files.

With an initial focus on mechanical engineering, the startup plans to help these professional users create feature-rich parametric designs in popular CAD software, starting with Onshape, known for bringing CAD to the cloud and reshaping workflows. “The same will be true with artificial intelligence,” Dave predicted.