Aurorin CAD

We help hardware companies ship faster

Winter 2026ActiveB2BEngineering, Product and DesignHard TechHardwareB2BAISan Francisco, CA, USA

Company

There are 2 problems: The first, CAD software is slow and the second, designing with it is a tedious process with many steps. Aurorin solves both of these problems by being a CAD software built from the ground up on a modern tech stack with AI at its heart. Building the CAD kernel lets us fully leverage AI while modernizing execution speed. Almost all existing CAD software (Solidworks, NX, Creo, Catia, Fusion 360, Onshape etc) use the same couple of underlying CAD kernels built in the 80's. It's common for these programs to take 4 hours to open a file. Aurorin uses a custom parametric and B-Rep driven CAD Kernel built to take full advantage of modern CPUs and GPUs and be AI native.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

CAD software is a massive B2B market — Autodesk alone is a $50B+ company, and the broader PLM/CAD market exceeds $10B annually. ICP is hardware/manufacturing companies, which have high willingness to pay and sticky software contracts. The pain point (slow legacy kernels from the 80s causing 4-hour file opens) is real and well-documented.

Medium Signal

Founder Signal

Michael Baron is a current Lehigh University student (graduating May 2026), so effectively still a student-founder. However, his internship pedigree is genuinely strong: 3x SpaceX intern (Raptor combustion simulation, Dragon GNC, Starshield), Apple GPU driver performance intern — all directly relevant to building a high-performance CAD kernel. He built a multi-GPU graphics engine from age 14. Impressive depth for his age but zero full-time professional experience and appears to be a solo founder.

Low Signal

Competition

The CAD market is dominated by entrenched giants: SolidWorks (Dassault), NX (Siemens), Creo (PTC), CATIA, Fusion 360 (Autodesk), and Onshape (PTC). Newer entrants like Plasticity, Shapr3D, and Solvespace also exist. Displacing these tools requires not just speed but full feature parity, and enterprise switching costs are enormous. Building a proprietary CAD kernel from scratch is a 5-10 year engineering effort even with a large team.

Low Signal

Product

Website shows a product screenshot and a 'Try It Free' CTA, but no named customers, pricing page, revenue metrics, testimonials, or API docs. The landing page is essentially a tagline plus early UI screenshot — no evidence of real user traction or paying customers.

OverallC Tier

Michael Baron has an unusually strong internship background for a student founder — SpaceX GNC and Apple GPU work are directly relevant to building a fast CAD kernel — but this is still a solo student founder with no full-time experience and no visible traction. The product is essentially vaporware at this stage: a landing page with a screenshot and no customers, pricing, or metrics. The competitive moat claim (custom CAD kernel) is technically credible but represents an extraordinarily long and capital-intensive build to reach feature parity with incumbents. The market is real and large, but the execution risk here is extreme — displacing SolidWorks or even Onshape requires years of kernel development, and enterprises are notoriously slow to switch CAD tools. Needs a co-founder, paying customers, and proof the kernel actually works at production scale before this is investable beyond the YC check.

Active Founders

Michael Baron

Founder

Founder of Aurorin, 3x SpaceX intern, prev Apple Intern. Before starting Aurorin, Michael worked on Raptor combustion simulation, Dragon Guidance, Navigation & Control, and Starshield flight software at SpaceX, as well as GPU driver performance at Apple.

Aurorin CAD

TierC Tier

BatchWinter 2026

Team Size1

StatusActive

LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA