CAD has supported industrial product and building design for over thirty years. The release reports more than 2 million companies using it in Italy and Germany.
According to the release, CAD work can take up to 50% of development time and requires specialist staff. NEOCAD applies generative AI to make design faster and more accessible. ZEST Group selected it among six promising startups through HabiSmart, the PropTech and Sustainable Construction accelerator in CDP Venture Capital SGR’s National Accelerator Network.
As with generative interfaces such as ChatGPT, users enter a prompt: dimensions, volume and material guide the creation of a 3D model, which is exported and refined in CAD for production. The release claims savings of up to 50% in design time and 30% in operating costs, alongside fewer human errors and shorter time to market.
On 3D modelling, “The future of industrial design is no longer just manual, it is generative. With NEOCAD, thanks to artificial intelligence, we instantly transform ideas into CAD models, redefining the
boundaries of innovation and creativity,” explains Luca Licciulli, co-founder of NEOCAD, who, together with Alessandro Toia (both under 30 with backgrounds in economics and management), developed NEOCAD with engineering input from the third co-founder, Ahmed Shahhat. “Any product, even a simple water bottle, is designed by engineers and developers using CAD before reaching industrial printing, which allows for the creation of the print shell from which the final product is then born,” Licciulli adds.
“With NEOCAD, we optimize and speed up the entire design process from the initial phase, from ideation to generation, reducing work timelines through the application of artificial intelligence. Despite the speed of change in this historical phase, CAD technology has not evolved with generative AI; therefore, our technology will not replace human work and creativity, but will serve as an aid, making certain decisive processes much more agile,” Luca Licciulli specifies. The announced Italian offering is a cloud subscription with three packages and three CAD versions for freelancers and companies in manufacturing and construction.
