CloudNC, a London software company building artificial intelligence for factories, has raised $20 million to speed up the rollout of tools that write machine code on their own. The money extends the company’s Series B and brings its total funding to $128 million since it started in 2015. Chief executive Theo Saville and chief science officer Chris Emery set the business up in their early twenties, wagering that machine shops would one day hand routine programming to software rather than to scarce skilled workers.
The company’s main product, CAM Assist, targets a slow step in metal manufacturing. Computer-controlled machines cut parts by following detailed code, and writing that code by hand can take hours. CAM Assist fits into the software machinists already use and drafts the instructions for them. “Machine shops everywhere are under pressure to quote and program faster, and deliver more with the people and machines they already have,” Saville said. He added that the tool “selects suitable tools, approach directions, and cutting feeds and speeds, and then drafts the code required to tell the CNC machine what to do.”
Nimble Ventures led the round, with support from Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First and LM Ventures, the investment arm of defense group Lockheed Martin. Backers framed the deal around a wider push to move manufacturing closer to home. “CloudNC’s automation of CNC will enable massive increases in onshoring of manufacturing,” said John Burbank, founder of Nimble Ventures, pointing to the pressure on Western factories to produce more without adding staff they cannot easily hire.
CloudNC now counts more than 1,000 machine shops as customers, roughly 80 percent of them in the United States, and employs about 80 people. The company plans to release a second tool, Quote Agent, in the coming weeks, aimed at helping manufacturers work out the cost and risk of a job before they commit to it. “Quote Agent is a natural next step for CloudNC as we seek to accelerate global machining with AI,” Saville said, describing quoting as another manual task ripe for automation.
Saville has been named among lists of young innovators in engineering, and the company has become one of the more visible names in British industrial technology. The founders argue that automating programming and quoting frees skilled staff for work that still needs human judgment, rather than replacing them. With the new funding, CloudNC said it would keep expanding in the United States and Europe while adding features to the products it already sells.
