The following is a narrative and condensed version of ENGtechnica’s Future of Design and Engineering Software podcast featuring István Csanády, CEO and founder of Shapr3D.
The first time I saw Shapr3D in action was in San Francisco in 2018. A young founder from Budapest named István Csanády stood in front of a room full of CAD insiders, holding nothing but an iPad and an Apple Pencil. There was no keyboard, no mouse, no workstation humming nearby. Yet within minutes, he was sketching solid models in real time—using the same Parasolid kernel that powered industry stalwarts like SolidWorks and NX.
I was amazed. CAD had always been synonymous with steep learning curves and complex desktop interfaces. Shapr3D looked like it belonged in the hands of an artist, not just an engineer. “CAD doesn’t have to be painful,” István told me later. “It should be as natural as drawing in a notebook.”
That moment, as it turns out, wasn’t just a clever demo. It was a broadside to 30 years of entrenched design software—and the beginning of Shapr3D’s campaign to make CAD intuitive, mobile, and delightful.
Growing Up With CAD Complaints
István didn’t start out as a CAD user. “I learned CAD when I was a teenager,” he said. “But even before that, I grew up hearing my parents complain about it at Sunday dinners.” His father was an engineer, his mother and brother both architects. CAD, in his household, was synonymous with frustration: difficult to use, expensive, and indispensable.
“I just grew up with this idea that CAD was ripe for disruption,” he said. “Even in the 1990s, it felt outdated—and not much has changed since.”
By the time he founded Shapr3D in Budapest, István had already been through one failed CAD startup and a stint in enterprise SaaS. “But I couldn’t get this industry out of my head,” he said. “It’s deep, complex, and it has a massive impact on the physical world. If you make design software better, you don’t just make engineers happier—you literally make global manufacturing more efficient.”
István has the numbers ready. “Sixteen percent of global GDP comes from manufacturing. If we can improve design productivity by even six percent, that’s a one-percent lift in global GDP.” For him, Shapr3D isn’t just another software company—it’s a lever for economic impact.
From Budapest to Everywhere
Budapest isn’t the first place most people would choose to start a CAD revolution. István embraces that outsider status. “People ask, ‘Why start in Budapest?’ I ask, ‘Why not?’” he said.
Hungary, he argues, has one of the world’s best talent pools for computational geometry and C++ engineering, a combination hard to find in Silicon Valley. “We have incredible people here, without the insane competition for talent that you see in the Bay Area.”
The result is a lean, high-output team. Shapr3D employs about 150 people—half in engineering and product management—and maintains full parametric CAD across four platforms: iPad, macOS, Windows, and Apple Vision Pro. “There aren’t many companies that can ship and maintain a system like that with such a small team,” he said.
Even as the company expands globally, with new offices in the U.S. and enterprise sales teams from Dublin to Paris, István insists that Shapr3D’s multicultural roots are part of its strength. Walk through their Budapest office and you’ll hear conversations in more than 20 languages. “Everyone here believes we’re building a generational company—one that will define the next fifty years of design and engineering software,” he said.
A Flagship for Apple—Now Everywhere
Shapr3D’s origin is inseparable from Apple’s hardware evolution. The app became one of the iPad’s flagship productivity tools, earning Apple Design Awards and appearances in more than ten keynotes. “We’ve had a great relationship with Apple,” István said. “But eventually we had to go where our users are—and most enterprise workflows still run on Windows.”
The decision to expand beyond Apple wasn’t ideological. “It was pragmatic and strategic,” he said. “Enterprise companies are still primarily on Windows. But we don’t think of Shapr3D as a collection of separate apps—we have one core product that adapts to each platform’s strengths.”
On the iPad, that means Pencil and touch input. On Vision Pro, immersive 3D review. On desktops, horsepower and screen real estate. “The same design follows you everywhere,” he said. “Start sketching on an iPad, refine on your workstation, review with your team in AR. It’s seamless.”
Cloud-connected, Not Cloud-dependent
While many next-gen CAD platforms trumpet their “cloud-native” credentials, István takes a contrarian view. “Cloud is great for storage, but not for computation,” he said flatly.
He breaks down CAD processing into three domains: visualization, geometric computation, and data storage. “Cloud systems push computation into the cloud and visualize locally. We draw that line differently—we do all geometric computation and visualization locally, and handle synchronization and collaboration in the cloud.”
The payoff is speed. “That’s how you get a high-performance, low-latency experience,” he said. “It’s why gaming hasn’t moved to the cloud. You just can’t get the same responsiveness.”
This hybrid model also solves a practical problem: working offline. “We have users on the shop floor at major automotive OEMs,” he said. “Many factories don’t have reliable connectivity. With Shapr3D, they can still open massive assemblies and work locally. The data syncs later.”
Shapr3D uses an embedded SQLite database to preserve data integrity even in a power failure. “You don’t even have to hit Save,” István said. “Everything’s versioned automatically, just like Google Docs. Even if lightning hits your iPad, your data’s safe.”
Competing by Differentiation, Not Imitation
István is quick to praise its closest competition, Onshape, but his view of the market is distinct. “You don’t win by copying legacy CAD features,” he said. “You win by doing something legacy CAD can’t do.”
For Shapr3D, that differentiator is user experience. “We want consumer-grade UX in professional design software,” he said. That philosophy has opened doors in places traditional CAD never reached—industrial designers, furniture makers, concept teams in automotive and aerospace.
“We’re not yet a full end-to-end solution for every workflow,” he admits. “But in conceptual design, product development, and manufacturing prep, we can be ten times faster and more intuitive.”
He sees Shapr3D’s role expanding gradually, but deliberately. “You can’t replace the core CAD stack overnight. Even SolidWorks and AutoCAD took years to gain traction. We’re nine years in, and now we’re seeing large-scale enterprise replacements. Disruption takes time.”
CAD, AI and the Myth of Magic Powder
No software conversation in 2025 is complete without AI. István has a measured view. “People treat AI like fairy dust—sprinkle it on your product and suddenly it’s intelligent,” he said, laughing. “That’s technology-first thinking, not customer-first thinking.”
He sees current large language models as powerful but limited. “They’re great with text, not geometry. They don’t have a deep spatial understanding—especially not with boundary-representation (B-rep) data.”
That said, he’s bullish on certain areas. “Visualization will be transformed by AI,” he said. “Jensen Huang said every pixel will be generated by AI rather than rendered—I agree. We’re adding an AI-based visualization enhancer that dramatically improves realism in Shapr3D.”
He also expects AI to streamline technical documentation. “Creating drawings is every engineer’s least favorite task,” he said. “AI can help automate 60 to 80 percent of that work—generate the views, dimensions, and layouts. The engineer becomes the checker instead of the drafter.”
A Steady Revolution
For all its ambition, Shapr3D’s tone is not of rebellion but of calculated evolution. The company moves methodically, refusing hype in favor of quiet technical depth. “To truly disrupt CAD, you have to innovate all the way down to the kernel level,” István said. “Imagine a system where Boolean operations never fail, where shells never break, where you can handle a million parts without slowing down—that’s where we’re heading.”
From that first iPad demo to its multi-platform ecosystem today, Shapr3D embodies a vision that feels both radical and inevitable: design tools that feel human again.
As our conversation wound down, I asked how he measured success. He paused, then smiled. “If you walk into any room in the world five years from now, and you can point to five objects that were designed in Shapr3D—that’s success.”
Listen to the full conversation with István Csanády on ENGtechnica’s Masters of Technology Podcast here: https://engtechnica.com/podcast/