Hestus was founded by Sohrab Haghighat and Kevin Chu, both among the first ten employees at Cruise who later led engineering teams at SpaceRyde and Mendaera. Drawing on that hardware and autonomy background, they set out to bring targeted AI assistance into computer-aided design, the software at the heart of mechanical and product engineering. Part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, Hestus focuses on the unglamorous but enormously time-consuming parts of CAD work.
The company's first product is Sketch Helper, a plugin for Autodesk Fusion 360 that debuted in September 2024. Rather than trying to generate entire designs, Sketch Helper automates routine, repetitive tasks such as interference checks and parametric adjustments, the kind of detail work that consumes engineer time and invites mistakes. Crucially, it preserves human oversight, acting as a copilot that accelerates the engineer rather than replacing their judgment.
This targeted, in-workflow approach is Hestus's defining philosophy. By embedding directly into Fusion 360 and focusing on specific automatable chores, the tool delivers concrete time savings without asking engineers to change how they work or trust an opaque generator with critical geometry. The bet is that practical, reliable automation of grunt work is more valuable in engineering than flashy end-to-end generation that cannot meet manufacturing precision.
Hestus serves mechanical engineers and hardware development teams who live in CAD and feel the drag of repetitive tasks. Its use cases center on accelerating design iteration, catching issues like interference earlier, and reducing the manual overhead of parametric modeling, all of which compress hardware development timelines.
In early 2025, Hestus announced 1.5 million dollars in seed funding led by Liquid2 Ventures and Rock Yard Ventures, with additional backing from Y Combinator and angels including Cruise and Twitch co-founder Kyle Vogt and Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky. With this funding, the company is expanding its AI-powered CAD capabilities and building toward a broader copilot for hardware development.