- CoLab’s first AI agent, AutoReview, has 47,000+ engineers on the waitlist and customers are “already making 7-figure bets” on CoLab’s EngineeringOS platform.
- The round was led by Intrepid Growth Partners, a growth stage firm focused on supporting category defining AI companies, with existing investors Insight Partners and Y Combinator also continuing their participation.
- Engineering teams adopting AI agents will collapse design cycles from months to hours, bringing life-changing products to the world years sooner, says CoLab.
- The team will launch multiple new AI agents and announce several strategic partnerships over the next 12 months to make this vision a reality.
ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland and Labrador–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CoLab today announced a $72M USD Series C fundraise, affirming its position as the company setting the pace in AI for engineering. The new funding comes on the heels of CoLab’s breakout launch of AutoReview, the company’s first AI agent. Since June, 47,000+ engineers have joined the waitlist, further accelerating CoLab’s revenue growth with the company on pace to nearly triple revenue in 2025.
CoLab’s Series C was led by Intrepid Growth Partners, a growth-stage fund backing the next generation of AI market leaders. Existing investors, including Insight Partners – which increased its position with a super pro rata investment – plus Y Combinator, Pelorus VC, Killick Capital, and Spider Capital returned for their third consecutive round, reflecting deep conviction in CoLab’s category leadership and rapid growth.
CoLab powers engineering for the world’s most advanced hardware companies — from next-generation vehicles to renewable energy and medical technology. Its AI-powered EngineeringOS transforms how design teams work together, review technical data and make critical decisions. The world’s largest manufacturers, including Ford, Lockheed Martin, GE Appliances, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric, use CoLab to run design reviews and co-design technology with their supply chains.
“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,” says Adam Keating, Co-Founder and CEO. “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.”
When it comes to the world’s most complex products, design isn’t a matter of sketching a concept and sending it to production. Teams spend months running through countless design iterations, reviews, and tests, using sophisticated tools to predict how every part will perform long before anything physical exists.
AI is transforming this process. It’s accelerating every tool engineers use — from generative CAD that can instantly propose new design concepts to AI-driven simulation that can test those concepts in seconds. Tasks that once required days of manual work are now happening almost instantly. But there’s a critical step AI can’t replace: deciding what’s right.
“Even with faster tools, engineering still depends on human judgment — the knowledge, intuition, and trade-offs captured in design reviews. That’s where CoLab comes in,” explains Mark Shulgan, Co-founder and Partner at Intrepid Growth Partners, who recently joined CoLab’s board. “The company is building the decision-making layer that connects people, data, and AI so teams can apply their expertise faster and more effectively than ever before.”
And no company is better positioned to connect human insight with engineering data than CoLab. For 8 years, engineering teams around the globe have used CoLab to complete virtual design reviews, digitally recording millions of expert annotations on 2D and 3D design files in the process. While other software can compare two designs and tell you what changed, only CoLab knows why. This knowledge model, the company says, is the key to training AI agents that can help engineers improve designs and catch errors – including some that would otherwise be overlooked:
“Every design decision leaves behind context: the discussions, tradeoffs, and rationale that explain why a product is designed a certain way,” says Co-founder and CTO Jeremy Andrews. “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.”
And with so many engineers approaching retirement, that knowledge gap is fast becoming one of the biggest risks in manufacturing. In the past three decades, the share of advanced manufacturing employees over 55 has more than doubled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — meaning decades of design expertise could soon walk out the door.
“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,” says Josh Fredberg, Managing Director at Insight Partners and former executive at PTC and Ansys. “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.”
The company launched their first agent, an AI peer checker that annotates models and drawings, in June of this year. Since the announcement, AutoReview has amassed a waitlist of 47,000+ engineers. CoLab’s existing customers, like TPI Composites and RYOBI (a TTI company), are already using AutoReview – with technical staff members reporting that the AI peer checker is “like having a mentor looking over my shoulder.”
In addition to soaring demand for AutoReview, a clear pull from executive teams contributed to the decision to raise a Series C:
“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,” says Keating. “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.”
The funding will be used to develop new AI agents, build integrations with other engineering and AI applications, expand partnerships, and scale go-to-market teams. CoLab plans to make several major product and partnership announcements before the end of the year.
About CoLab
CoLab builds AI-powered software for mechanical engineering and hardware development teams. Its EngineeringOS platform helps engineers make better, faster design decisions by connecting people, data, and AI in one collaborative workspace—capturing expert knowledge as a natural part of day-to-day work.
With AI agents built into the platform, CoLab enables teams to apply that knowledge automatically to improve design quality and accelerate product development. Founded in 2017, CoLab is trusted by leading global manufacturers to drive decision velocity and bring better products to market, faster.
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