At Maker Faire Bay Area last October, one of the more interesting projects was an AI CAD project called Adam. The team was from UC Berkeley’s Jacob Institute for Design Innovation. Last week, Make: caught up with one of the team members, Zachary Dive, who told us that the team was accepted into startup incubator Y Combinator and they were preparing for the big Demo Day in March. We ask Zach if he’d like to share his team’s journey over the next month with us and he agreed. We start with a brief introduction and we’ll add new videos over the coming weeks.
Turn Text into a 3D Model
Zachary Dive and the team at AdamCAD have built an AI CAD application where users can type a prompt and view a 3D object model, which can then by fine-tuned and sent to a 3D printer.
As the team described themselves and their work:
We’re Aaron, Avi and Zach from Adam and we are building AI Powered CAD for mechanical design. AdamCAD is a Text to CAD editor which allows makers to speak physical objects into existence. You simply put a prompt in on our web-app and we generate a parametric CAD file for you that you can 3D print! Check out our fun promo vid.
To work well for 3D printers, the models don’t just have to resemble what you ask for, they also need to be watertight, able to exist in the physical world (no soap-bubble-thin surfaces), and not contain geometry that printers would struggle with. They presented at MakerFaire Bay Area 2024, and just opened up the program to the first 10,000 trial users. Pricing starts at $5.99/mo for a basic subscription. Head over to their site if you’re interested in joining the waitlist for the next round.
We’re a group of avid makers (we have three 3D printers at home) and we’re currently part of the Y-Combinator Winter 2025 batch. YC is a startup accelerator which funds early-stage startups and we have our demo day in just a couple weeks! We hope you can try out what we’re building and make some awesome things.
We’re looking forward to post updates from Zack and the team as they approach their demo day debut.