$25.27 billion. That’s the global CAD software market in 2026.
Three companies — Autodesk, Dassault, and Siemens — hold over 65% of it. Autodesk alone commands 29% of revenue share. AutoCAD specifically has 38.6% of the product install base.
And the standard pricing model hasn’t changed in a decade: subscription seats at $1,600+/year per user, enterprise deployment timelines measured in months, and file formats designed to keep you locked in.
Meanwhile, the engineers who actually use these tools every day are building workarounds in Python, running open-source viewers when the license server goes down, and spending 40% of their time on file management instead of engineering.
I built NEXUS CAD because the gap between what a refinery engineer needs and what Autodesk sells is enormous. A petroleum engineer doing a turnaround walkdown doesn’t need parametric surface modeling. They need fast 3D visualization, photo-to-point-cloud reconstruction, and the ability to export to P&ID tools without a six-figure software stack.
Browser-based. Three.js engine. No installation. No seat license. No lock-in file format.
The CAD market is a $25 billion oligopoly with a customer satisfaction problem. Startups like Onshape proved the browser-based model works. The next step is domain-specific CAD for the industries that Autodesk treats as an afterthought.
What’s the most frustrating limitation of your current CAD tool that nobody seems to be fixing?