C-Infinity, a startup building AI software for manufacturing process planning, has raised $16 million to expand its platform. The company’s core product, AutoAssembler, automates the step between a finished digital design and a factory-ready production plan — a step that still takes most engineering teams weeks to complete by hand.

The bottleneck starts the moment a design is finished. Every physical product begins as a 3D digital model in a CAD system, which is the software engineers use to draw and simulate parts. Turning that model into a set of instructions that tells workers how to actually build the product requires engineers to manually work out how components fit together, in what sequence, and under what physical constraints. For complex products, this process can take weeks. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global AI in manufacturing market was valued at $7.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 38% through 2034, with production planning among the fastest-growing application segments.

The $16 million round was led by Canaan Partners. Inventus Capital, Bee Partners, and Radius Capital also participated.

Why Process Planning Has Lagged Behind Other Manufacturing Tech

Most AI investment in manufacturing has gone toward predictive maintenance, quality inspection, and supply chain management. Process planning — the step where engineers translate a digital model into physical production instructions — has seen far less attention. It requires software to reason about geometry, spatial relationships, motion, and how parts physically constrain each other. That kind of reasoning is difficult to automate, which is part of why this particular problem has persisted.

The computer-aided process planning market was valued at roughly $1.27 billion in 2025 and is growing at around 7.4% annually. Traditional planning tools still depend heavily on human engineers to do the core reasoning. C-Infinity argues its approach is different because it uses what it calls first-principles geometric reasoning, meaning the software derives assembly plans from the physical properties of the design itself rather than from historical production data.

“After advising Sai for two years, it’s clear C-Infinity is building the missing compiler for the physical world. For too long, the manual translation from digital design to production has been a massive hidden cost and a bottleneck for throughput. By applying first-principles geometric reasoning to the engineering workflow, they turn weeks of manual backlog into minutes of automated planning, delivering the deterministic logic that high-mix manufacturing finally needs.”

Kumar Sreekanti, Venture Partner at Canaan Partners

How C-Infinity Is Already Being Used

The company has not detailed specific plans for the new capital, but its current deployments give some indication of where it is headed. AutoAssembler is already in use at Global Fortune 100 manufacturers, as well as smaller firms. Early users report that planning workflows that used to take weeks now complete in minutes.

The company’s broader goal goes beyond assembly planning. C-Infinity describes what it is building as “engineering intelligence,” a category of software that actively participates in engineering decisions rather than just recording or organizing data. In practice, that means the platform also handles engineering change order reviews, where teams assess how a design modification affects the production plan, and generates assembly instructions that are ready to hand directly to the factory floor.

“C-Infinity combines deep technical innovation with clear, real-world applicability, something that is rare in this category. The team is solving a hard problem that directly impacts manufacturing efficiency and competitiveness.”

Kanwal Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus Capital Partners

What C-Infinity Builds and Who Leads It

C-Infinity is led by CEO Sai Nelaturi, who holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before co-founding the company, Nelaturi served as R&D Director at Carbon, a manufacturing technology firm, and at PARC, a research center originally established by Xerox. He is a recipient of both DARPA and UW career awards. The company’s Chief Scientist, Johan de Kleer, holds a Ph.D. from MIT, is an ACM Fellow and AAAI Fellow, and previously served as VP of R&D at PARC.

AutoAssembler connects directly to a manufacturer’s CAD and PLM systems. PLM stands for product lifecycle management, the software companies use to manage product data from design through production. Once connected, the platform analyzes 3D models, figures out how parts relate spatially, identifies the correct assembly sequence, flags potential fitment problems before anything is physically built, and produces a set of ready-to-use production instructions.

What distinguishes the approach is what the software reasons from. Most AI tools in manufacturing are trained on past data and learn patterns from previous production runs. C-Infinity’s software instead works from the geometry and physical properties of the design itself, reasoning about how objects fit, move, and interact in three-dimensional space.

“Manufacturers have worked with this bottleneck for years, and it’s generally accepted as business as usual. What’s changing now is that AI can move into physically reasoning about how products are actually built, allowing companies to reduce the time between design and production in a way that wasn’t previously possible.”

Sai Nelaturi, CEO of C-Infinity

The Investors Behind the Round

Canaan Partners, which led the round, is an early-stage venture capital firm with a 37-year track record. The firm has raised over $7 billion across 13 funds and has backed companies through 73 IPOs and 152 acquisitions.

Inventus Capital Partners, led by Managing Director Kanwal Rekhi, also participated in the round. Bee Partners and Radius Capital joined as additional investors. Kumar Sreekanti, who serves as Venture Partner at Canaan and previously held the role of CTO at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also advises C-Infinity directly.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/c-infinity-raises-16m/
Originally Posted: Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:17:09 +0000