Opinion
Noone: Hardware design software has not been fundamentally updated since the 1980s
“Then it last was updated in the eighties. And it's still a industry fully driven by engineers with a mouse clicking on a screen.”
Assertion Contradicted
Noone: Hardware engineers historically lacked code-based CAD automation tools
“And that code allows scripting, automation, scaling, things like equations and database lookups and logic, things that sound obvious to anyone who's done software before. Of course, you'd think that software could write a loop that changes the geometry of a fe…”
Assertion Contradicted
Noone: There has not been an engineering software IPO since 1986
“There hasn't been an engineering software IPO since 1986. It's been 40 years of the same major incumbents.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Noone: Programmatic Design for Manufacturability checks do not exist without human review
“There is no way to programmatically do a DFM check. You know, for a part, there's some software that kind of does it. You're still going to be sending it to your machinist. You're going to send it to the manufacturing engineer.”
Disclosure
Noone: Zoo will launch text-to-CNC toolpath generation within 18 months
“If it's text straight to the CNC machine, then that will be a capability that will come out in the next year, year and a half from us as a company is you can have your text prompt, send something to a CNC machine because you have that toolpath generated in pro…”
Opinion
Noone: Hardware development labor and software represent a $1 trillion market
“And so for us, we view it as about a trillion dollar sized market. That's both the labor and the software license costs for actually running those hardware development programs.”
Insight
Noone: Manual CAD interfaces scale engineering communication complexity quadratically
“It's a very, again, labor-driven, very slow process that ends up compounding, you know, the number of times or number of parts you have interfacing squared. That's the number of interfaces you have. That's the number of engineers you have having kind of cross …”
Assertion Partly supported
Noone: Zoo built the first GPU-optimized cloud CAD geometry engine using CUDA
“So our view was we would start with this geometry engine. That's the world's first GPU optimized cloud-based API accessible CAD engine. We built that from scratch. So that's CUDA, which is kind of GPU level machine language CUDA level implementation of those c…”
Insight
Noone: The inability to edit outputs is generative AI's biggest bottleneck
“You get 95% of the way there, and there's one feature in your image that you need different, and there's nothing you can do about it. Then, other than try to slightly change your prompt, slightly perfect your prompt, it's a huge bottleneck in the generative AI…”
Insight
Noone: CNC toolpath generation is the costliest part of machine shop prototyping
“Generating a CNC toolpath is the expensive part of running a machine shop, especially something doing cutting edge hardware where you're prototyping, you're making one off runs. Most of that cost is going into engineering labor to generate the instructions for…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jordan Noone: Zoo sees highest adoption from combined hardware-software teams
“The people who we tend to see the most adoption from are people that see software development and hardware development side by side.”
Disclosure
Zoo to merge Text-to-CAD directly into CAD modeling app in V1.0
“Right now we're doing a push for what we call version one point O of both of those products. Those will actually merge together that rather than generating text to CAD and having a part, you can now do that in the modeling app and then make downstream changes.”
Disclosure
Noone: Zoo monetizes the majority of its traffic via API
“And the reason we started open sourcing those tools is one that those tools still drive traffic through our API. That's where we monetize a majority of our incoming traffic and is that they still create traffic on top of us.”
Assertion Supported
Noone was the youngest person to receive FAA rocket launch clearance
“I was the first person in the world, the youngest person in the world to get FAA clearance to fly a rocket to space.”
Assertion Supported
Noone: Relativity Space has 1,200 employees and raised $1.2B
“Relativity is now a 1200 person company, raised about 1.2 billion in private capital it's headquartered down in Long Beach here in Los Angeles.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Noone: Zoo users generated 13,000 CAD files on Text-to-CAD launch day
“The day we launched text-to-CAD in December of last year, we had 13,000 CAD files generated the first day of launching the platform.”
Disclosure
Noone: Zoo is building its first local GPU data center
“We're starting to build out our first local data center. And for our own GPUs, both for the geometric rendering side and the ML training side, we use those on both sides of the stack there.”
Disclosure
Zoo has raised about $6 million total in venture capital
“So historically we've raised only about six million in private venture capital.”
Disclosure
Former GitHub CEOs Tom Preston-Werner and Nat Friedman backed Zoo as angels
“Two of the angels in us are two of Jess's previous coworkers, which is Tom Preston Werner, the original GitHub founder, CEO, and then Nat Friedman, who took over the CEO for Tom after that.”
Jordan Noone