CloudNC, a London software company building artificial intelligence for factories, has raised 20 million dollars to speed up the rollout of tools that write machine code on their own. The funding extends the company’s Series B and lifts its total raised to 128 million dollars since it launched in 2015. Chief executive Theo Saville and chief science officer Chris Emery started the business in their early twenties, betting that machine shops would one day hand routine programming to software.
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 slots 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.
Nimble Ventures led the round, joined by Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First and LM Ventures, the investment arm of the defence group Lockheed Martin. Backers tied the deal to a broader push to bring 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 strain on Western factories to produce more without hiring staff they cannot easily find.
CloudNC now counts more than 1,000 machine shops as customers, roughly 80 percent of them in the United States, and employs around 80 people. The company plans to release a second tool, Quote Agent, in the coming weeks, designed to help manufacturers weigh the cost and risk of a job before they take it on. “Quote Agent is a natural next step for CloudNC as we seek to accelerate global machining with AI,” Saville said.
Saville has appeared on lists of young innovators in engineering, and the company has grown into 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 judgement, rather than cutting jobs. With the new money, CloudNC said it would keep expanding in the United States and Europe while adding features to the products it already sells.
