Intelligent CIO North America Issue 64 | Page 31

INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI is changing engineering as CoLab raises US $ 72M to lead the Digital Transformation

CoLab has announced a US $ 72 million Series C fundraise, affirming its position as the company setting the pace in AI for engineering. The new funding follows the St John’ s, Canada, based startup’ s breakout launch of AutoReview, the company’ s first AI agent. Since June, more than 47,000 engineers have joined the waitlist, further accelerating CoLab’ s revenue growth with the company on pace to nearly triple revenue in 2025.

The round 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 leadership and 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. Companies such as 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,” said 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.”
AI is transforming design processes by accelerating every tool engineers use – from generative CAD that instantly proposes new concepts to AI-driven simulation that tests those concepts in seconds. Tasks that once required days of manual work are now happening almost instantly. But there’ s a crucial 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,” explains Mark Shulgan, Co-Founder and Partner at Intrepid Growth Partners.“ The company is building the decisionmaking layer that connects people, data and AI so teams can apply their expertise faster and more effectively than ever before.”
For eight years, teams worldwide have used CoLab to complete virtual design reviews, digitally recording millions of expert annotations on 2D and 3D design files.“ Every design decision leaves behind context: the discussions, trade-offs and rationale that explain why a product is designed a certain way,” says Co-Founder and CTO Jeremy Andrews.“ 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.”
The funding will be used to develop new AI agents, build integrations with other engineering and AI applications, expand partnerships and scale go-tomarket teams. CoLab plans to make several major product and partnership announcements before the end of the year. p
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