LOS ANGELES, CA, July 18, 2022 – KittyCAD, the world’s first and only company to build hardware design infrastructure for the internet, announced today that its product, the first API for hardware designers, has come out of private beta and account signups are available to the public on KittyCAD’s website. During beta, KittyCAD trialed an initial feature set with users while developing cutting edge backend infrastructure, previously announced on the KittyCAD blog, to support the development and launch of its API.
The 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). The company further details its vision on a newly released Product page, and announced the proprietary KittyCAD software platform will have rolling feature releases throughout the year.
KittyCAD is leading a revolution in hardware engineering with a mission to develop the world’s most advanced software for hardware designers. KittyCAD was co-founded by Jordan Noone, Hannah Bollar, Jenna Bryant and Jessie Frazelle, and was incubated by Embedded Ventures.
The company is part of NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to nurture startups revolutionizing industries with advancements in AI and data sciences. This program helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment, and allows KittyCAD to help drive business forward through a variety of platforms. NVIDIA Inception also offers the opportunity to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations.
“Our team is incredibly excited to launch KittyCAD’s API features as we’ve been rapidly preparing our next feature rollout,” said Hannah Bollar, co-founder and CTO of KittyCAD, who previously worked as a render pipeline software engineer on the LookDev Tools-Rendering team at Pixar.
KittyCAD’s CEO Jordan Noone continues his role at Embedded Ventures as CTO and General Partner. Jordan previously co-founded Relativity Space and was CTO for the first five years. Relativity has raised $1.3 billion from top investors and was most recently valued at $4.2 billion. Embedded Ventures, founded by Jenna Bryant and Jordan Noone, led KittyCAD’s previously unannounced pre-seed financing in 2021.
“I couldn’t be more proud to undertake such a pivotal role as CEO and help to foster growth for KittyCAD,” said Jordan Noone, CEO of KittyCAD and co-founder, CTO, and general partner at Embedded Ventures. “KittyCAD is introducing the revolutionary design tools I would have wanted as an engineer and founder prior to this, building on top of my experience bringing the aerospace manufacturing floor to the 21st century at Relativity. Now it’s time to do the same for the design floor.”
“Not only were we a uniquely qualified group of people who understood the problem needing to be solved, but we also were uniquely qualified to solve it ourselves,” said Jenna Bryant, co-founder of KittyCAD and co-founder, CEO, and general partner at Embedded Ventures. “To be able to play such an integral role in KittyCAD’s founding story was pivotal for us as a venture capital firm and for KittyCAD’s development.”
In addition to KittyCAD, Embedded Ventures’ portfolio includes: Akash Systems, Inc., Chromatic 3D Materials, Inversion, Skyryse, and Slingshot Aerospace. The firm has a multi-year partnership with United States Space Force (USSF)’s SpaceWERX office, which enables the two parties to investigate the potential benefits of leveraging VC investment practices to accelerate the pace of change and innovation, while examining the USSF industry business relationships to define future methods for investment into the VC ecosystem.
About KittyCAD
KittyCAD is the world’s first and only company to build hardware design infrastructure for the internet. The company is transitioning hardware design from point-and-click software to modular, automated, reusable code. KittyCAD was incubated within Embedded Ventures and was co-founded by CEO Jordan Noone, CTO Hannah Bollar, Jenna Bryant and Jessie Frazelle. Noone has an extensive ecosystem of founders, operators, and engineers who are ideal customers for KittyCAD, along with the first-hand experience of operating a startup bottlenecked by mechanical CAD limitations. Bollar comes from the animation and games space, working at Pixar to build their automated internal tools, and now is developing an equivalent set of tools for hardware designers at KittyCAD.
About Embedded Ventures
Launched in 2020, Embedded Ventures is a next generation venture capital firm investing in dual-use space startups beyond launch. Best described as “the skunkworks of deep tech Venture Capital” because of their unique investment approach and backgrounds, Embedded has a first-of-its-kind partnership with the United States Space Force. Co-Founders Jenna Bryant and Jordan Noone both have atypical industry experiences and strong passions for the communities they represent. The firm invests in pre-seed and seed stage startups focused in space operations, digital engineering, and advanced manufacturing. To date, Embedded Ventures has announced investments in Akash Systems, Inc., Chromatic 3D Materials, Inversion, KittyCAD, Skyryse, and Slingshot Aerospace. To invest with Embedded Ventures, apply to their Opportunity Fund on AngelList.