Offer CAD as native assemblies with their history, drawings and test results, from designs the company owns: that is what buyers name and what the free datasets lack
The buyers that name CAD ask for depth, not file counts: Mercor's hardware listing wants full multi-part assemblies in native CAD with feature trees, not exported meshes, with drawings, circuit designs and test results across product generations, and excludes single parts, part catalogs and customer-owned designs; Telegraph Lab reports paying a 70-person engineering firm $450K for its records, CAD drawings with calculations, technical reports, revisions and project specifications. The large public CAD collections do not offer that: Autodesk's Fusion 360 Gallery is for non-commercial research only, and the ABC dataset's one million models are public Onshape documents whose copyright stays with their creators.
Dated 29 Oct 2026Source checked 29 Oct 2026Basis: indicative
“Full multi-part assemblies in native CAD with feature trees, not only exported meshes”
Mercor, referral listing "Hardware Engineering Company", checked 17 Oct 2026
Telegraph Lab, Data partnerships page, Our past data licensing deals, checked 19 Oct 2026
Autodesk AI Lab, Fusion 360 Gallery Dataset License, checked 29 Oct 2026
NYU Faculty Digital Archive, ABC Dataset chunk record, checked 24 Apr 2019
- Hardware Engineering Company: its records licensed through Mercor, on Mercor's own listing for this kind of company
- Mercor's listing for hardware engineering companies asks for engineering teams with native CAD vaults: complete multi-part assemblies in native CAD with their feature trees rather than exported meshes, circuit board designs, drawings and the test results that go with them, across several products or product generations, with automotive, aerospace, robotics and industrial equipment named as the priority. It names SolidWorks PDM, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, Autodesk Fusion, Onshape, Altium, KiCad and ANSYS among the tools.
- Mercor's hardware engineering listing requires designs the company owns, not customer IP, and lists single parts or parts catalogs and designs owned by the company's customers as not a fit; its first scoping questions are which CAD system holds roughly how many assemblies, and whether the company or its customers own the designs.
- Mercor, its listing "Hardware Engineering Company": "License CAD assemblies, circuit designs and test results from real products."
- A 60-person accounting firm's records (five years of workpapers, reconciliations, financial models, tax-preparation files), licensed to an unnamed buyer; Telegraph Lab says it paid the business
- A 70-person engineering firm's records (CAD drawings, calculations, technical reports, revisions, project specifications), licensed to an unnamed buyer; Telegraph Lab says it paid the business
It is shown on its own, not counted into a figure.
Cited in this guide