London's CloudNC raises $20M to automate CNC machining programming

CloudNC, based in London, has raised $20 million from Nimble Ventures, Calculus Venture Capital and LM Ventures. The company builds AI-powered tools for CNC machining programming and automation.

The bottleneck it targets

CNC machines cut metal parts by following a toolpath - a precise sequence of movements generated from a part design. Producing that toolpath is skilled work, it is slow, and the people who do it well are retiring faster than they are being replaced.

That makes programming, rather than machine capacity, the binding constraint in a great many machine shops. A shop can have idle machines and a full order book at the same time because there is nobody available to program the job.

Automating that step is unglamorous and specific, which is generally a good sign in industrial software. The customer knows exactly what it costs them today.

The European angle

CloudNC is one of a small number of UK deep-tech companies raising into industrial automation rather than into AI applications. It is a smaller round than most on this week's list, and a useful reminder that the European hardware and manufacturing layer is still funded at a different scale than its US software equivalent.

Sources

1. Tech Startups: Venture Capital & Startup Funding Roundup, September 9, 2026