Zoo Introduces Zookeeper, a Conversational Agent for CAD Design

Announcement

Zoo, a company that creates infrastructure for hardware design, today announced the launch of Zookeeper, a conversational CAD design agent that helps engineers move from intent to fully editable CAD models through natural language interaction. With Zookeeper, users can describe what they want to design, ask questions, explore alternatives, and iterate on existing designs, all within Zoo Design Studio.

Zookeeper lets engineers delegate tasks such as research, reasoning, and manufacturing-aware design decisions to an AI agent that designs based on their goals and descriptions. It conducts relevant research, proposes design constraints and parameters, and generates a clear design plan before producing a CAD model. The resulting model is fully editable using the same sketch and feature tree workflows engineers already rely on. Building on their Text-to-CAD experience, the team added research and reasoning capabilities and engine-level tools that allow the agent to inspect, snapshot, and debug geometry while generating production-ready CAD.

“We built Zookeeper as a toolchain, not a walled garden,” said Jessie Frazelle, CEO and Co-Founder of Zoo. “The same CAD tools it uses in Zoo Design Studio are exposed through our Zoo-MCP server, so teams can plug Zookeeper into whichever AI agent and model they trust, including agents running locally. That’s what modern hardware development needs: composable, inspectable design workflows that fit your stack.”

What differentiates us

Zoo provides a unified platform that includes AI-driven generation and modification of boundary-representation CAD files within a traditional CAD environment. Other solutions typically generate uneditable, mesh-based CAD files or rely on disjointed, plugin-based workflows.

Unlike other AI-driven design tools that operate as black boxes, Zookeeper produces transparent, structured outputs within the traditional CAD environment. It proposes explicit design constraints, parameters, and references, and represents designs through a clear, inspectable feature tree. Engineers can modify designs manually, conversationally, or programmatically, with changes reflected consistently across all interfaces.

Our Products

“Zookeeper doesn’t replace the tools engineers already trust,” said Jordan Noone, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Zoo. “It amplifies them. You can ask it to design a part from scratch, iterate on an existing model, or explain how something works. Delegating design tasks helps engineers focus their time on the most valuable creative work.”

Zookeeper is available within Zoo Design Studio and leverages Zoo’s proprietary geometry engine, which enables scalable, cloud-native CAD workflows. The agent is also accessible through Zoo’s ML-ephant Machine Learning API and works alongside the KittyCAD Design API, allowing developers and companies to integrate conversational design capabilities into their own applications.

Company Overview

About Zoo

Zoo develops modern tools for hardware design, including first-of-their-kind generative AI capabilities for CAD. Its flagship product, Zoo Design Studio, is modeling software that serves as the central hub of a broader CAD ecosystem, which includes innovative tools like Text-to-CAD and a suite of enterprise-ready CAD APIs for developers. Zoo’s products are built on its proprietary geometry engine, which acts as a digital bridge between hardware development and machine learning frameworks. The engine is the first to be GPU-based, cloud-implemented, API-accessible, and dynamically scalable. Zoo was incubated within Embedded Ventures, with additional investors including Venrex Partners, Adventure Fund, Alan Rutledge, Andrew Cote, Anomaly Fund, Autopilot Fund, Bernie Lagrange, Carl Bass, Chestnut Street Ventures, Ex Nihilo, Gaingels, IEQ Capital, Jude Gomila, Kelvin Beachum, Liquid 2, Madrona, Matt Terrell, Nat Friedman, Quantonation, Preston-Werner Ventures, Undeterred Capital, Unpopular Ventures, and USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. Zoo is led by co-founders Jessie Frazelle, Jordan Noone, and Jenna Bryant.

Press Contact

For more information: Zoo, press@zoo.dev