Autodesk

Autodesk is a 40+ year veteran of the design software industry, with products that span the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) verticals plus product design, manufacturing, and media & entertainment. The company went public in 1985 and trades on NASDAQ as ADSK.

The company's flagship products include AutoCAD (the world's most widely used CAD platform, in continuous release since 1982), Revit (BIM platform dominant in commercial architecture), 3ds Max and Maya (entertainment and game design), Inventor and Fusion 360 (mechanical design and manufacturing), and Construction Cloud (project management for general contractors). Autodesk also owns Civil 3D for civil engineering, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Mechanical, and a growing suite of cloud collaboration tools.

In late 2023, Autodesk launched "Autodesk AI" as a unified branding for generative-AI features integrated across the product portfolio. Notable additions include Forma's site-planning AI (acquired through the 2020 Spacemaker acquisition for $240 million and rebranded as Forma in 2023), Revit Insight's ML-powered building performance analytics, AutoCAD Smart Blocks for ML-driven block placement, AutoCAD Markup Import using vision AI, and Autodesk Assistant for natural-language workflow help. The company is investing heavily in generative design — letting designers specify constraints and goals while AI proposes optimized layouts — and in cloud-based real-time collaboration for AEC project teams.