Introducing Zoo

When we had the idea for KittyCAD in 2021, we had only a preliminary idea of how our product roadmap would evolve. All we knew was that we wanted to build APIs to allow anyone to build modern hardware design tools. Fast forward to today, we’ve expanded our product roadmap to also include building certain tools on top of our own API. Jess expands on how and why we did this for our Modeling App in her blog post: Putting the KittyCAD API to work.

One of the initial goals for our Modeling App was to have it as an open source project built on top of our graphics infrastructure, as an example and starting point for our customers developing their own applications. We are continuing this trend by open sourcing the interface to Text-to-CAD, built on top of our recently launched machine learning infrastructure.

We have seen two distinct cohorts of customer usage across this range of products. First, there are a growing number of developers building their own tools, leveraging our API infrastructure to develop their own automation, platforms, and startups. Second, we see customers that solely use the Modeling App and have no desire to ever implement an API call themselves. Similarly, we expect the Text-to-CAD user base to also include a large portion of users that solely use our pre-built, open-source interface, rather than integrate the functionality into their own use cases via our API.

This has left us with a challenge - these two customer cohorts are looking for very different things. Different use cases, different documentation, different tutorials, and different ways to find our solutions.

We are solving this challenge by expanding our branding and messaging. Today as a company, we are changing the company from KittyCAD to Zoo. Our API infrastructure will have their own branding and messaging, focused on developers. The KittyCAD brand will be preserved on our flagship product, our KittyCAD: Design API. KittyCAD stands alongside our new machine learning infrastructure, within ML-ephant, our Machine Learning API.

In summary:

• Zoo will be the umbrella branding for the company.
• KittyCAD is our Design API, focused on developers integrating our graphics capabilities into their own products.
• ML-ephant is our Machine Learning API, focused on developers integrating our machine learning capabilities into their own products.
• We will continue to ship our own applications, marketed to end-users, and open-sourced for developer expansion. Today’s examples include our Modeling App, Text-to-CAD, and Diff Viewer.