KittyCAD, a company building a product design infrastructure for the internet, has announced the launch of its API for hardware designers.
Founded and incubated within Embedded Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in space startups, during its beta testing, KittyCAD says it trialed an initial feature set with users while developing a ‘cutting edge backend infrastructure’ to support the development and launch of its API.
The company says that its API supports hardware designers in developing automated workflows that read, write, and auto-generate metadata on top of hardware design files, and introduces those files to widely successful software development tools such as git and CI/CD (continuous integration/ continuous deployment).
According to KittyCAD’s product roadmap, it has split its product development into three phases, with the majority of the development being done sequentially, with elements of all three phases happening in parallel:
Phase 1: Workflow Automation Automation and scripting of the hardware design ecosystem. These are low barrier-to-entry features both for development, and for adoption. Examples being file management, revision control, metadata access and use, integration into other software tools like CI/CD workflows and git
Phase 2: CAD Engine Addition of geometric creation and edits, expanding on the market entry with workflow automation. Allows the scripting not only of the operations before/after CAD edits, but also inclusive of CAD edits
Phase 3: Application Frameworks Developing products that combine the workflow automation and CAD engine in a tighter feedback loop, such as auto-generation of CAD geometries based on requirements, automatically pushing a completed & verified design to manufacturing, multi-physics analysis of a part and edits of the base geometry to improve performance, etc.
The company is part of the Nvidia Inception start-up program, which is hoped will allow KittyCAD to drive business forward through a variety of platforms, as well as offering the opportunity to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organisations.
“Our team is incredibly excited to launch KittyCAD’s API features as we’ve been rapidly preparing our next feature rollout,” said KittyCAD CTO and co-founder Hannah Bollar, who previously worked as a Render Pipeline Software Engineer on the LookDev Tools-Rendering team at Pixar.
KittyCAD was co-founded by Jordan Noone, Hannah Bollar, Jenna Bryant and Jessie Frazelle, and was incubated by Embedded Ventures, itself founded by Bryant and Noone, the latter continuing his role there as CTO and General Partner.
Additionally, Noone previously co-founded Relativity Space, most recently valued at $4.2 billion.
