Post by AI World

The Draghi report identified Europe's real productivity gap: not inventing AI, but diffusing it into existing industries. Neocad addresses it directly. Manufacturing companies accumulate decades of design expertise, almost all of which is locked in CAD files. Each new project risks reinventing validated solutions because the archive cannot be queried by geometry, function or intent. The problem is not a lack of expertise, but access. Neocad (Italy, founded in 2024 by Luca Licciulli, Toia Alessandro and Ahmed Shahhat) integrates with the main CAD and PLM systems on the market without migration and makes the company's design archive interrogable in natural language. The €550,000 pre-seed round was led by 40Jemz Ventures and HabiSmart (CDP Venture Capital's National Accelerator Network), with Zest GroupCOIMA and Nova Founders Capital also participating. The "Apply AI" initiative of the Competitiveness Compass identifies the adoption of AI among established manufacturers and SMEs as a structural priority for EU industrial competitiveness. This is the gap Neocad is built for. It operates on the diffusion layer, not the frontier - and it is there that European productivity is really played out: in bringing AI into companies that already have the know-how. Congrats to the entire Neocad team, including: Simone Besana, Ahmed Shahhat, Luca Licciulli, Sabrina Giudici, Toia Alessandro, Simone De Vita, Marco Mantovani, Sulayman Mo Ali, Abdallah Mashaly et al. Which other verticals - design intelligence, manufacturing operations, quality control - deserve more attention than they receive?