CoLab secures USD $72 million for AI tools to transform engineering

CoLab has secured USD $72 million in Series C funding to support further development of its AI-powered platform for engineering teams.

The latest investment round was led by Intrepid Growth Partners, with existing supporters Insight Partners, Y Combinator, and several others returning. This brings additional resources to accelerate the launch of new AI agents and growth initiatives as the company reports increasing demand for its flagship AutoReview tool.

Investor confidence

The funding round marks continued backing from both new and previous investors. Insight Partners, already a substantial backer, increased its commitment as part of the deal. Mark Shulgan, Co-founder and Partner at Intrepid Growth Partners, has also joined CoLab's board. The returning investment reflects ongoing conviction in CoLab's business model and adoption trajectory among major industrial companies.

Customers using CoLab include recognised manufacturers such as Ford, Lockheed Martin, GE Appliances, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric. The platform's AI-enabled EngineeringOS supports design reviews and facilitates collaboration between teams and suppliers on complex projects.

AI in design

CoLab's platform is used to handle technical data, design reviews, and engineering decision-making. The introduction of its AutoReview AI agent has attracted a waitlist of more than 47,000 engineers since June. AutoReview's features include annotating models and drawings for design checks, providing technical staff with rapid feedback. Interest has grown among executives keen to incorporate AI at the strategic level, with some customers reportedly making commitments extending into seven figures.

"Behind every feat of engineering, there's thousands of design decisions. And the most critical decisions in industry still happen slowly - in 20-person meetings, weeks apart. CoLab is changing that. We envision a world where skilled engineers collaborate with AI agents that can access their entire company's collective knowledge, collapsing design cycles from months to hours," said Adam Keating, Co-Founder and CEO, CoLab

Knowledge retention

One of the driving forces behind CoLab's technology is the need to retain and scale expertise in a sector where much of the workforce approaches retirement age. The company's tools help capture and digitise expert knowledge, converting annotations and discussions from design reviews into structured data. This is seen as increasingly important as manufacturers face the risk of losing experienced engineers to retirement.

Co-founder and CTO Jeremy Andrews emphasised the challenge of eliciting such insights from engineers in a usable format. "Every design decision leaves behind context: the discussions, trade offs, and rationale that explain why a product is designed a certain way. What we've learned is capturing that knowledge is a user-experience problem. Engineers will only share what they know if the process feels natural and valuable - and that's the breakthrough CoLab has made. Without that, expert design knowledge stays locked in people's heads," said Andrews.

Industry responses

Josh Fredberg, Managing Director at Insight Partners and a former executive at technology firms PTC and Ansys, underlined the risks for North American and European manufacturers. "North America and Europe have led the way in advanced design and manufacturing for decades - but the rest of the world is catching up. We risk losing even more ground if we don't capture and scale our engineering knowledge now. CoLab has figured out how to do that in a way that few software companies have, and that's about to become even more powerful with AI," said Fredberg.

Product development

CoLab intends to use the new funds to create additional AI agents, build integrations with other engineering software, expand its list of industry partners and increase its sales and support teams. Customers such as TPI Composites and RYOBI have begun adopting AutoReview, with technical staff describing it as equivalent to having a mentor assisting their work. The company expects to announce further product launches and partnerships in the coming months, addressing ongoing executive interest in scalable AI strategies for engineering teams.

"We've had executive teams - not just engineering leadership, but CEOs, CFOs, and cross functional leadership - asking us to build their AI strategies with them. Many are already making 7-figure bets with CoLab. It's clear AI isn't just an interesting experiment any more - it's a competitive advantage in their top-down strategy," said Keating.