HOUSTON – CoLab, a provider of artificial intelligence software for engineering teams, said on Tuesday it raised $72 million in a Series C funding round led by Intrepid Growth Partners, as demand surges for AI that can capture expert knowledge and accelerate complex design decisions.
The funding round affirms CoLab’s position in the competitive field of AI for engineering, driven by the breakout launch of its first AI agent, AutoReview. Since its announcement in June, more than 47,000 engineers have joined a waitlist for the tool, helping to put the company on pace to nearly triple its revenue in 2025, CoLab told Reuters.
The Series C was led by Intrepid Growth Partners. Existing investors, including Insight Partners – which increased its position with a super pro rata investment – plus Y Combinator, Pelorus VC, Killick Capital, and Spider Capital also participated, marking their third consecutive round.
CoLab’s software, dubbed an “EngineeringOS,” is used by major manufacturers like Ford, Lockheed Martin, and Schneider Electric to manage design reviews and collaborate with their supply chains. The company argues that while AI is accelerating individual engineering tasks like computer-aided design (CAD) and simulation, the critical process of human decision-making remains a bottleneck.
“Behind every feat of engineering, there’s thousands of design decisions. And the most critical decisions in industry still happen slowly — in 20-person meetings, weeks apart,” said CoLab CEO and Co-founder Adam Keating. “CoLab is changing that.”
The company’s strategy hinges on capturing the “why” behind design choices—the discussions, trade-offs, and rationale typically locked in meeting notes or engineers’ heads. For eight years, its platform has digitally recorded millions of expert annotations on technical files, building what it calls a unique knowledge model.
This model is now training AI agents, starting with AutoReview, which acts as an automated peer checker for designs.
“What we’ve learned is capturing that knowledge is a user-experience problem. Engineers will only share what they know if the process feels natural and valuable – and that’s the breakthrough CoLab has made,” said Co-founder and CTO Jeremy Andrews.
This capability is becoming critically important as a wave of retirements threatens to erase decades of institutional knowledge in advanced manufacturing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of manufacturing employees over 55 has more than doubled in the past three decades.
“North America and Europe have led the way in advanced design and manufacturing for decades – but the rest of the world is catching up. We risk losing even more ground if we don’t capture and scale our engineering knowledge now,” said Josh Fredberg, Managing Director at Insight Partners.
Mark Shulgan, Co-founder and Partner at Intrepid Growth Partners, who recently joined CoLab’s board, described the company as building the “decision-making layer that connects people, data, and AI.”
Keating said the new capital will be used to develop new AI agents, build integrations with other engineering applications, and scale go-to-market teams. He noted that executive teams, including CEOs and CFOs, are now directly involved in AI strategy, making significant investments with CoLab.
“It’s clear AI isn’t just an interesting experiment any more – it’s a competitive advantage in their top-down strategy,” Keating said.
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