Theo Saville, chief executive and co-founder of CloudNC. Credit: CloudNC CloudNC has raised $20mn to push its AI machining software into more workshops and launch a second product aimed at quoting, the commercial bottleneck that sits in front of every job a precision manufacturer takes on. The round is led by Nimble Ventures, a US venture investor, with Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First and LM Ventures, Lockheed Martin’s venture arm, also taking part. The London-headquartered company, which runs its own factory in Chelmsford, will spend the money on commercial expansion in existing and new markets and on building out its product line.
Its current product, CAM Assist, attacks the slowest step in computer-controlled machining. Turning a part design into a machining strategy and a set of toolpaths is skilled, repetitive work that can take a programmer hours, and it is the reason a shop with idle machines can still have a queue. CAM Assist generates that programming and leaves the machinist to approve and adjust it. More than 1,000 machine shops now use it, several hundred of them in the United States.
The new product, Quote Agent, is due later this year and targets a different constraint. Before a shop machines anything, it has to assess an enquiry and price it, a manual process that decides whether the work is won at all. “Quoting is one of the biggest hidden bottlenecks in precision machining,” said Theo Saville, CloudNC’s chief executive and co-founder. “Move too slowly and shops can lose the opportunity, or price inaccurately and they can lose margin once the job reaches production.” That is a shrewd choice of second product. Programming software sells to the workshop floor; quoting software sells to whoever owns the margin, and it produces a number the customer can check against their own experience within weeks. It also puts CloudNC in front of a buyer who has never had a reason to think about CAM software at all.
What the announcement does not include is worth noting. There is no round letter, no valuation, and no figure for total capital raised. CloudNC closed a $45mn Series B in June 2022, backed by Atomico and Episode 1 Ventures with Autodesk and Lockheed Martin joining as strategic partners. Four years on, a $20mn raise led by a new investor and announced without a letter attached reads as a bridge to commercial scale rather than a step change in valuation, though nothing in the announcement confirms that either way.
CloudNC is unusual in the category for making things itself. Alongside the software business, it runs a working precision machining factory in Chelmsford, which means the product is tested against the same constraints its customers face rather than against a simulation of them. That has been part of the pitch since Atomico and Episode 1 backed the company, and it is the sort of arrangement that either accelerates a product or splits a small team’s attention, depending on who is asked. The defence thread running through it is more explicit.
Lockheed Martin is both an investor and a named customer, alongside Major Tool and Machine, and CloudNC is working with Knox Systems towards FedRAMP certification for CAM Assist, which would clear it for US government agencies and defence contractors handling sensitive workloads. John Burbank, who founded Nimble Ventures, tied the investment directly to that: automating CNC work, he said, will enable “massive increases in onshoring of manufacturing and global production of mission-critical components”. Onshoring is the argument that makes this category fundable. Western manufacturers are being asked to bring production home at a moment when the machinists who can program these machines are retiring faster than they are being replaced.
Software that lets an existing team get more parts out of existing machines is the only answer available on the timescale governments are demanding, which is why a company founded in 2015 to automate a niche of industrial software now finds itself in the middle of an industrial policy argument.
