NEOCAD
NEOCAD is an AI platform that turns a manufacturer's existing CAD archive into a searchable asset. Engineers find parts by plain-language description or geometric similarity, then reuse validated designs instead of redrawing them from scratch.
What is NEOCAD?
NEOCAD is an artificial intelligence platform built for the technical office of manufacturing companies. Its premise is that most engineering teams already own the answers they spend their days looking for: decades of drawings, parts and assemblies sitting in a CAD archive nobody can search properly. NEOCAD indexes that archive and makes it queryable.
Two search modes carry the product. The first is natural language: a designer describes the component they need in ordinary words, without knowing its part number or the naming convention used by whoever drew it years earlier. The second is geometric similarity, where the platform compares component shapes and returns comparable parts from across the company's files. Both run against a structured index that NEOCAD builds automatically over the entire portfolio.
Around that sit four capabilities the company labels Co-thinker, Intelligent search, CAD Inspector and Decision support. Together they cover history-based suggestions, where the system flags designs already validated internally, and real-time contextual prompts while an engineer works, with the stated aim of cutting errors and late-stage rework.
The platform is designed to sit beside existing tools rather than replace them. NEOCAD states native compatibility with SolidWorks, NX Siemens, CATIA, PTC Creo, Inventor and AutoCAD, plus integration with corporate PLM systems, and no migration is required. It is offered in Cloud or On-Premise mode, and the company's FAQ states that CAD files remain in the customer's infrastructure, the platform working on metadata and indexes rather than copies.
In June 2026 NEOCAD announced a patent filing covering what it calls a closed-loop architecture: rather than only suggesting changes, the system is designed to act on the CAD model itself, searching, verifying manufacturability against materials in stock, tooling and regulatory constraints, then generating the modification instructions. The company claims this brings the rate of invalid geometry, which it puts at 15 to 20 percent for generative AI applied to CAD, close to zero.
NEOCAD is an Italian startup founded in 2024 in Legnano, near Milan, and run by three co-founders.
What it does
- Search an entire corporate CAD archive in plain language, without knowing any part code
- Find similar components by comparing geometry across every file in the archive
- Build a structured, searchable index of the company's whole CAD portfolio
- Surface previously validated design solutions that can be reused on a new project
- Receive contextual AI suggestions while working, drawn from earlier design decisions
- Check whether a component can actually be manufactured with the materials and tooling available
- Work alongside SolidWorks, CATIA, Inventor and PTC Creo without migrating anything
When to use NEOCAD / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if NEOCAD is the right fit.
When to use NEOCAD
- Mechanical design teams in manufacturing companies sitting on decades of accumulated CAD files
- Technical offices where engineers lose hours hunting for components that already exist internally
- Automotive and industrial groups already standardised on SolidWorks, CATIA, Inventor or PTC Creo
- R&D teams that would rather reuse a validated design than start every project from a blank sheet
- Companies whose CAD archive is large, historic and largely unstructured
When not to use NEOCAD
- Freelancers and small studios that need a published price before booking a sales call
- Teams looking for a free plan or a self-service trial, since neither is offered
- Buyers who insist on reading the terms of service and a data processing agreement first, as neither is published
- Developers hoping to call the platform from their own code: no public API documentation exists
- Anyone working outside mechanical CAD, as every supported format is an industrial mechanical design tool
How to use NEOCAD
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Read the solution page to check that your CAD formats and workflows are covered
- Book a thirty-minute demonstration through the scheduling link, or send the contact form for a written reply
- Discuss scope with the team and choose between Cloud and On-Premise deployment
- Point NEOCAD at the existing CAD archive so the platform can index it automatically
- Allow a few days: the company states that a team becomes operational quickly, with no complex setup
- Carry on working in SolidWorks, CATIA, Inventor or PTC Creo, since nothing is migrated or replaced
- Search the archive by describing in plain language the part you need
- Or supply a reference model and let geometric similarity return comparable components
- Reuse a validated design rather than redraw it, and act on the suggestions surfaced while you work
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No migration required: it works alongside the CAD software already installed
- CAD files stay in the customer's infrastructure, with only metadata and indexes processed
- Finds parts without any knowledge of part codes or naming conventions
- Geometric similarity retrieves components that keyword search would never surface
- Built specifically for large, historic and unstructured archives rather than tidy ones
- Backed by a patent filing and a research partnership with Fondazione Bruno Kessler
- More than 1.1 million euros raised, with selection by NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft for Startups, Google for Startups and AWS Activate
Cons
- No public pricing at all, so budgeting is impossible without a sales conversation
- Neither a free plan nor a free trial is advertised
- The site publishes no terms of service and no legal notice, so the contract cannot be read in advance
- The published privacy policy covers the marketing website, not the handling of CAD data
- No data processing agreement is offered and no security certification is claimed
- Nothing is said about where platform data is hosted
- No public API documentation and no mobile application
Pricing & Plans
NEOCAD publishes no pricing. No price point, currency or billing unit appears anywhere on the website or in its sitemap, and neither a permanent free plan nor a time-limited free trial is advertised. Access is arranged through a sales conversation: prospective customers request a thirty-minute demonstration or submit the contact form. The only monetary figures the company publishes concern its own funding, not the cost of the product.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how NEOCAD handles your data.
GDPR overview
NEOCAD is established in Legnano, Italy, so it falls directly under the GDPR and needs no Article 27 representative. Its privacy policy, hosted by iubenda and last updated on 13 April 2026, carries a dedicated section for users in the European Union. It lists the legal bases relied on, from consent and contract to legal obligation and legitimate interest, and enumerates the rights of withdrawal, objection, access, rectification, restriction, erasure, portability and complaint to a supervisory authority, with a one-month response commitment. Two gaps deserve naming. The policy covers the marketing website only, not the CAD data handled by the platform. And the address it gives for exercising those rights, info@vrtualize.it, sits on a third-party domain. No DPO is named and no data processing agreement is offered.
Who owns the data?
NEOCAD publishes no terms of service, so no contractual clause on data ownership can be read before contacting the company. What the site does state, in its FAQ, is that CAD files stay inside the customer's own infrastructure: the platform works on metadata and indexes rather than on copies of the files. The iubenda privacy policy names Neocad Srl, Piazza San Magno, Legnano, as data controller, but it covers only the marketing website, meaning newsletter sign-ups, the contact form and trackers. Ownership of the CAD data processed by the product itself is nowhere addressed in public documentation.
Reuse rights
With no terms of service published, the site sets out no rules on what a customer may do with the data the platform produces, whether that means indexes, search results or generated models. The only usage statement concerns the website: the privacy policy lists contacting users, analytics, traffic optimisation, infrastructure monitoring, hosting and embedded content, naming Google Analytics 4, Google Maps, Sentry, Wix and Google Cloud CDN as third-party services. NEOCAD describes its AI as trained on mechanics and industrial design without saying where that training data comes from, and never states whether customer CAD data feeds model training. Anyone who needs that answer will have to ask for it.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
NEOCAD names no hosting country and no hosting region for its platform. The company states two deployment modes, Cloud and On-Premise, and in the on-premise case the data stays on the customer's own systems by definition. Its FAQ adds that CAD files remain inside the customer's infrastructure, with the platform working on metadata and indexes rather than on copies of the files. That is the extent of what is published. The only processing locations documented anywhere belong to the marketing website rather than the product: the privacy policy names the United States for Google Analytics 4, Sentry and Google Cloud CDN, Ireland for the Google Maps widget, and Israel for Wix. That last entry is questionable, since the website visibly runs on WordPress and resolves to a French-hosted address, so the policy appears to describe an arrangement the site has since left. None of these locations should be read as the jurisdiction of the CAD data itself. A buyer with a data-residency requirement will need to raise it directly.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting NEOCAD.
- Reuse can quietly become the default: an engineer who always starts from an existing part may stop asking whether a better design exists
- Trusting a similarity result without checking it is easy, and geometry that looks close is not always functionally equivalent
- Younger engineers who learn to search rather than to model risk losing the fluency that comes from drawing something from scratch
- Manufacturability checks are only as good as the data behind them, and a stale stock or tooling record produces confident but wrong answers
- Indexing an entire CAD archive concentrates a company's most valuable technical knowledge in one system, which raises the stakes of any access-control failure
- With no published terms of service or data processing agreement, the obligations on both sides rest on whatever the sales contract happens to say
- Enterprise-grade security is claimed in the FAQ but backed by no certification, so it should be tested rather than taken on trust
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
NEOCAD presents setup as light. Onboarding is described as quick and non-invasive, indexing of the CAD archive runs automatically, and the company states that a team can be operational within a few days without complex configuration or interruption to normal work. Nothing is migrated and no existing CAD software is replaced. Two caveats apply: an On-Premise deployment will require IT involvement that the site never describes, and no public documentation, installation guide or technical specification exists to verify any of this before the first sales conversation.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind NEOCAD
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What CAD formats does NEOCAD work with?
How does geometric similarity search work?
How long does implementation take?
Where do our CAD files end up?
What does NEOCAD cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
Can NEOCAD be installed on our own servers?
Is there an API?
Who is behind NEOCAD?
Does NEOCAD suit a large, disorganised archive?
Should you pick NEOCAD?
NEOCAD is refreshingly narrow in what it promises. It does not try to generate mechanical designs from nothing; it goes after a problem every established manufacturer recognises, namely an archive of drawings so large and so poorly indexed that engineers redraw parts the company already owns. Natural-language search and geometric similarity are the right instruments for that problem, and the decision to sit alongside SolidWorks, CATIA, Inventor and PTC Creo rather than replace them removes the usual objection to adopting anything new in a technical office.
The company has assembled real credibility for a startup founded in 2024: a patent filing on its closed-loop architecture, a research partnership with Fondazione Bruno Kessler, more than 1.1 million euros between a pre-seed round and Invitalia's Smart&Start programme, and selection by NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft for Startups, Google for Startups and AWS Activate. It says it already works with industrial customers, including international automotive groups.
The reservation is documentary rather than technical. Almost nothing a buyer needs in order to evaluate a vendor is published. There is no price, no plan, no trial, no terms of service, no legal notice, no data processing agreement and no statement of where platform data is hosted. The privacy policy that does exist covers the marketing site and, on inspection, still names a hosting provider the site no longer uses and a contact address on another company's domain. None of that makes the product weak, but it does mean every serious question has to be asked in a sales call.
For a technical office sitting on a decade or more of CAD files, NEOCAD is worth the demonstration. Go in with a written list of questions about pricing, contract terms and data handling, because the website will not answer them.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.