Leo AI, a startup focused on transforming mechanical engineering through artificial intelligence, has raised $9.7 million in total funding, including a recent $5 million seed round led by Flint Capital. The company is building what it calls the world’s first domain-specific AI platform for mechanical engineers, designed for automating tedious tasks and accelerating product development.
Since its launch, Leo AI has already been adopted by over 20,000 engineers globally and has achieved strong revenue performance in its first month of monetization.
Founded by mechanical engineers Dr. Maor Farid and Moti Moravia, Leo AI was born out of their shared frustration with outdated engineering workflows. Despite their success in academia and industry, both found themselves spending more time searching for parts, navigating legacy systems, and repeating manual tasks than actually designing innovative products. After gaining experience in AI—Maor through a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT and Moti in the defense sector, they reunited to build a solution tailored to the needs of mechanical engineers.
Leo AI’s platform is designed to integrate directly into engineers’ existing workflows, including CAD systems and product lifecycle management tools. It reads and understands both text and CAD files, enabling it to answer technical questions, solve engineering problems, run calculations, locate parts, and generate 3D concepts. Unlike generic AI tools that rely on public data and often produce inaccurate results, Leo AI is trained on over one million verified engineering sources, including books, standards, and professional articles. This specialized training allows it to achieve a reported 96 percent accuracy rate when assisting with engineering tasks.
The company’s mission is to help engineers focus on what they do best—building great products—by eliminating the repetitive and time-consuming aspects of their work. Leo AI is not designed to replace creativity but to support it by handling the background tasks that slow down innovation.
By saving engineers an average of five hours per week, the platform has the potential to accelerate breakthroughs in fields like medical devices, electric vehicles, sustainable packaging, and energy-efficient manufacturing.
Leo AI’s approach has attracted attention from major players in the engineering world. Bertrand Sicot, former CEO of SolidWorks and Deputy CEO of Visiativ, described Leo as the first AI truly built for engineering, predicting it would significantly impact how products are developed. The company’s investor list includes TechAviv, 2 Lanterns VC, OurCrowd, Mento VC, and strategic backers such as the VP of Research and Engineering at Google, as well as other leaders in the mechanical engineering software space.
Leo AI is utilized by engineers at companies such as Scania, HP, and Mobileye. It is distributed through value-added resellers in markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, France, Germany, Poland, the Benelux region, and Israel. With its growing adoption and strong investor support, Leo AI is positioning itself as a foundational tool for the future of mechanical engineering.
KEY QUOTES:
“Product design is the embodiment of human creativity. It’s a natural urge as old as human intelligence itself, bursting within us when we are kids building spaceships from wooden blocks in daycare. MEs are talented people who came to our profession in the name of this urge to build and innovate, but eventually, we find ourselves in front of software that hasn’t seen innovation since the 1990s.”
“Despite what Hollywood and Ironman teach us to believe, we don’t believe that AI will take away the fun part of the creation process—the creative, innovative parts of turning ideas into a product. We believe the opposite—that AI should and will take over the tedious manual tasks of finding parts on PLM, looking for information in piles of documents, and running mundane calculations.”
“It took 46 years to bring electric cars from concept to mass adoption, and over a decade to develop the James Webb Space Telescope – imagine how much of that time was spent writing documentation, redoing revisions, chasing approvals, and correcting avoidable mistakes.”
“We are proud to build not only the first AI for MEs but also the most boring, unsexy AI you can think of – the opposite of Ironman’s Jarvis. We don’t turn ideas into robots; we learn from your piles of data on your PLM and local directories, both CAD and text, integrate into your CAD, and find answers to your technical questions, solve engineering problems, run calculations, find parts, and generate 3D concepts. All of this is based on your best practices, with context, accuracy, integrated into your workflow, and 100% safe.”
“Leo is the first AI for Mechanical Engineering. It’s like a super engineer who has read all the text and CAD documents in your PDM, looks at your SolidWorks, stands behind your engineers, and helps them make better decisions faster.”
“Imagine ChatGPT that understands CAD and is connected to your company’s data.”
“Before we started Leo, it felt like all the other professions had their own AI – lawyers have Harvey, developers have Cursor – what about MEs?! Today we finally have our own AI.”
Dr. Maor Farid, Co-Founder & CEO at Leo AI
“Leo is the first AI applied to engineering, and engineers are dying for this progress. I believe it’s going to change the way people are developing products by massively impacting the engineering process.”
Bertrand Sicot, the former CEO of SolidWorks and Deputy CEO of Visiativ—one of the largest distributors of engineering software in the world
