Zoo - AI Enabled CAD for Hardware Design

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This week’s Startup feature is Zoo.dev. Zoo offers a suite of tools and infrastructure to modernize Hardware production.

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Company & Team Introduction

Zoo, formerly known as KittyCAD, is a CAD design platform offering a comprehensive suite of tools to revolutionize how hardware products are built. The company was founded by a world-class leadership team of Jessie Frazelle, Hannah Bollar, Jordan Noone, and Jenna Bryant in 2021 and incubated by Noone and Bryant’s venture firm, Embedded Ventures. Before Zoo and Embedded, Noone held roles as CTO and was a co-founder of 3D rocket printing unicorn ($4.2B) Relativity Space, an engineer at SpaceX, and a tenure with the US Department of State. Frazelle previously co-founded and served as Chief Product Officer at infrastructure startup Oxide Computer Company, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and Software Engineer at Google. Bollar previously worked as a Render Pipeline Software Engineer at Pixar, and Bryant was a Partner at Riot Ventures before co-founding Embedded. Noone is Zoo’s Executive Chairman; Frazelle is CEO; Bollar joined the founding team of another startup in 2023, and Bryant is still involved in the company as a board member. Zoo is headquartered in Los Angeles but has scaled its team entirely remotely and now has ~38 employees.

Product Overview

Zoo offers a suite of tools on its platform, including Text-to-CAD, its Modelling App, its Diff Viewer, and two infrastructure products, KittyCAD and ML-Ephant. Here is a breakdown of each tool:

Text-to-CAD— An open-source tool allowing users to generate CAD files from a text prompt.

Modelling App— The modelling app is an open-source CAD tool running on remote GPUs that allows you to easily generate CAD models by editing code and point-and-click actions.

Diff Viewer— An open-source browser extension allowing users to visualize CAD changes easily. It works with the industry-standard platform GitHub and supercharges the user experience with a rich CAD visualizer. It works with any Chrome, Edge, or Chromium-powered browser.

These tools are built on Zoo's underlying infrastructure, and customers can also leverage Zoo’s APIs in their own tools.

KittyCAD— Their CAD design API is available in any language that supports REST API calls, and client libraries for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust are available.

ML-Ephant— Their Machine Learning API allows users to simply enter a prompt and get back a CAD file. It is available in any language that supports REST API calls, and client libraries for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust are available.

Total Addressable Market

While it is far from the most talked about vertical in venture capital, hardware manufacturing plays a critical role in the development of the products we use every day, and the software and infrastructure being used in these processes can have massive impacts on the speed and quality of the hardware being produced. According to research from market.us, the global market for engineering design software was already worth $39B in 2022 and is expected to grow at a 12.76% CAGR through 2032, expanding Zoo’s market opportunity to a staggering ~$128B by 2032.

Business Model & The Numbers

Zoo utilizes a simple freemium consumption-based business model to better align value creation with usage for users. The company offers 40 minutes of free access to its API for the free trial. After the trial period, Zoo charges $0.50 per minute of additional access. Small API calls that take under 10 seconds are free.

Traction

Zoo doesn’t share a ton about the financials of the business (revenues, customer count, unit economics, etc.), but if the quality of investors on their cap table and the number of investors doubling down on their earlier investments are any indications, the company should be performing well financially. The company’s leadership is packed with seasoned entrepreneurs who have chosen the boring, heads-down approach to building, optimizing for value creation, not hype.

Competitors

While everyone is trying to build horizontal AI products or apply AI to a hot vertical like FinTech, massive industries that aren’t considered “sexy,” like hardware design software, are left behind, with little innovation happening in the space. The lack of new competitors in the vertical has allowed incumbents to become complacent without the threat of formidable new entrants taking their market share. Noone disclosed on the Payload podcast that the original idea was to invest in an existing innovative startup in digital manufacturing via their VC firm Embedded Ventures, and they could not find a single company in the space they thought was worth investing in. Noone and Bryant actually put out a call to action for some of the immature open-source products in the space to be built into a product that could adequately serve enterprise customers, but they were bombarded by inbound with people telling them that their experience and expertise made them the perfect team to build the such a product. KittyCAD’s AI applications, cloud-based GPU engine, simple consumption model and code-focused modelling approach have allowed the company to separate from the swath of outdated traditional CAD products currently on the market.

Funding

Zoo has raised four rounds of funding in total. The company’s first capital injection came from its incubation period with Embedded Ventures in the summer of 2021. In May 2022, Zoo raised an official pre-seed round, raising an undisclosed amount from Undeterred Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures. The company also raised an undisclosed amount in its early 2023 seed round, spearheaded by Brian Keil at Alumni Ventures. Other participants in the funding included Sequoia Capital, Venrex, and follow-on investment from pre-seed participant Liquid 2 Ventures. In June 2023, Zoo raised an additional $5M in seed funding led by previous Venrex doubling down and participation from other earlier investors, Liquid 2 Ventures and Undeterred Capital, and added new backers such as USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Gaingels, Madrona, Tom Preston-Werner (Co-founder, GitHub), Nat Friedman (ex-CEO, GitHub), Kelvin Beachum (Cardinals, NFL), and Matt Terrell (Senior Product Manager, Google/Sequoia Scout).

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