On the eastern edge of Canada, where the Atlantic tests steel and stamina daily, CoLab Software is building something designed to outlast both. From St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Adam Keating and co-founder Jeremy launched the company in 2017 with a sharp observation: engineering decisions move quietly but carry billion-dollar consequences. So they built EngineeringOS, an AI-powered platform where human engineers and machine intelligence review designs together, capturing millions of annotations across 2D and 3D files and converting institutional knowledge into a living system.
The market did not hesitate. In November 2025, CoLab closed a $72M Series C led by Intrepid Growth Partners, with Insight Partners, Y Combinator, Pelorus VC, Killick Capital, and Spider Capital participating. Mark Shulgan joined the board. Ajay Agrawal framed the investment as proof that machine intelligence is rearchitecting industrial sectors. Mark Machin pointed directly at product development as a fault line ready for transformation. Adam Keating brought the metric that cut through the noise: more than 47,000 engineers joined the waitlist for CoLab’s first AI agent. In startup news, demand signals matter more than declarations. A waitlist that size is not marketing. It is pressure building behind a door.
EngineeringOS is already embedded inside Ford, Johnson Controls, GE Appliances, Lockheed Martin, and Schneider Electric. These are companies where design errors ripple through supply chains and margins. CoLab’s AutoReview agent reads prior annotations, surfaces repeat risks, and applies accumulated engineering judgment before mistakes scale. In manufacturing, memory protects margin. CoLab has turned memory into infrastructure.
On February 11, 2026, Adam Keating announced CoLab is hiring 100+ people this year to make EngineeringOS a reality at full operational velocity, highlighting VP Engineering and VP Design as priority roles. That scale of hiring following a $72M raise signals more than headcount growth. It signals execution mode. Capital has moved. Now talent must follow. In serious startup news, this is the shift from vision to build.
CoLab is not positioning AI as spectacle. It is embedding it where decisions are made, argued, documented, and approved. Collaboration is in the name, but coordination at machine speed is the ambition. If 47,000 engineers raised their hands before EngineeringOS is fully deployed, what happens when the system becomes standard operating procedure across global product teams. That is the kind of startup news that reshapes categories quietly, then all at once.
