montauk-capital - CEO & Co-Founder, Stealth Agentic CAD Co

• Strategic Vision & Category Creation: Define and evangelize the vision of Engen as the vertical-specific "System of Action", building and then moving beyond simple text-to-CAD tools to build an "autonomous mechanical engineer" that orchestrates the entire design-to-manufacture loop. • Commercial Execution & Pilot Acquisition: Lead the "Business Development-led" technical roadmap by securing strategic "toehold" pilots in high-velocity, mid-consequence verticals (e.g., industrial automation, robotics). Focus on securing partners willing to grant access to proprietary datasets in exchange for custom solutions. • Data Strategy & Defensibility: Negotiate complex data-licensing agreements to solve the "Proprietary Data Hostage" problem, ensuring Engen acquires the fine-tuning data necessary to build a durable moat against generic incumbent models. • Product Roadmap Orchestration: Guide the evolution from "Phase 1: The Wedge" (a CAD plug-in for immediate workflow automation) to "Phase 2: The Moat" (a cross-application agentic fabric), balancing immediate utility with long-term autonomy. • Team Building: Recruit a high-caliber technical co-founder and founding team with rare cross-disciplinary expertise in geometric kernels (Parasolid, ACIS), agentic AI, and mechanical engineering workflows. • Fundraising & Stakeholder Management: Drive external funding processes by articulating the technical value proposition to investors, validating the differentiation against frontier models, and managing board relationships. • 5-10 years of leadership experience, preferably within industrial SaaS, CAD/CAM software, or AI-driven workflow automation. • Proven commercial track record in technical software for industrial sectors (EPC, manufacturing, automotive), with an understanding of ways to navigate long sales cycles and adoption risk. • Domain Depth (CAD/PLM): Deep understanding of the engineering software landscape, including the friction between "System of Record" (PLM) and CAD softwares, and the technical constraints of geometric kernels. • Agentic AI Strategy: Ability to conceptualize and deploy agentic workflows that operate as a "peer" to the engineer, utilizing technologies like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to stitch together fragmented toolchains coupled with our own proprietary fine-tuned large language models. • Demonstrated ability to monetize data strategies, specifically transforming pilot data access into a defensible, proprietary global model. • Operational Agility: Capability to iterate quickly in "mid-consequence" markets (e.g., consumer hardware tooling) to validate technology before scaling to high-liability sectors like aerospace. • Technical Fluency: Sufficient technical grasp to partner effectively with a kernel-expert CTO and define product requirements for complex constraint solvers and feature-tree logic. • Experience scaling early-stage ventures, specifically in navigating the "0 to 1" phase of finding product-market fit and securing initial enterprise partners.