CoLab raises $72M Series C to scale AI agents for engineering

CoLab Software has closed a $72m Series C round to accelerate development of AI-driven tools for product engineering. The financing, led by Intrepid Growth Partners with participation from Insight Partners and Y Combinator, underlines growing investor appetite for software that embeds generative AI into hardware development workflows.

Founders left traditional engineering paths to address a recurring problem: critical design decisions are still governed by fragmented notes, screenshots and email trails rather than structured institutional knowledge. That gap makes product reviews slow, error-prone and hard to audit — a vulnerability across automotive, aerospace and industrial customers.

CoLab’s platform aims to turn that tacit know‑how into searchable, actionable intelligence. Customers such as Ford, Bombardier, Johnson Controls and Lockheed Martin now use the product to centralise technical reviews, share findings with suppliers, and preserve design intent for future teams. The company argues that while product data shows what changed, its system captures the rationale — and that contextual layer unlocks faster, safer decisions.

Earlier this year the business began shipping AI features, starting with AutoReview, an automated design peer-review agent that annotates 2D and 3D files. Since launch the company has recorded a 48,000-engineer waitlist and reports that major engineering teams are already using AutoReview for first‑pass checks. CoLab positions AutoReview as the first tile in a broader vision it calls EngineeringOS, where specialist engineers and AI agents collaborate to compress design cycles from months into days.

Growth metrics are eye-catching: the startup says headcount has reached 165 people and revenue trajectory has climbed sharply — up about 1,730% over the past three years. Those figures reflect a rare combination of strong enterprise adoption in a sector often described as difficult for software scale-ups: industrial and manufacturing verticals.

For the market this deal is a signal. Enterprise engineering software — historically dominated by CAD and PLM vendors — is entering a phase where AI features and knowledge capture become differentiators. Analysts estimate that engineering and product-lifecycle software sits in a multibillion-dollar market globally, and vendors that can embed institutional knowledge into workflows stand to gain share. CoLab says the fresh capital will fund product expansion, scale go-to-market and recruit talent across engineering and AI teams. The company is actively hiring and encouraging candidates interested in building the next generation of engineering tools to apply.