Building CAD Software in the Cloud

The big lesson from the SaaS companies of the 2010s was that Cloud is King.

Mach9 is an AI-native San Francisco-based software company in 2026. From where our engineers sit, it's easy to forget just how much of a revolution the cloud was in software.

In fact, many Mach9ers grew up in an already cloud-native world! If you were born after 2001, you've always reached for Google Docs instead of Word, or Figma instead of Adobe Illustrator.

In today's world, where Hacker News talks about how “local-first technology” will win, it's easy to forget those bad old days when documents lived physically on one person’s computer, and if they were out, you couldn’t access them. But not all verticals have received the benefits of cloud yet. Let's remember why cloud won, together.

Software in the cloud, rather than a desktop:

1. Keeps your completed work accessible, not trapped on a single person's computer.
2. Allows you to work from anywhere without installing a new piece of software.
3. Unshackles the application's performance from the hardware limitations of your system.
4. Enables instant, continuous feature rollouts, bugfixes, and updates.
5. Allows for live collaboration between different users.
6. Ensures that there are never version conflicts between different versions of the software.
7. Saves you from backup hell, and never loses data if an application crashes.
8. Centralizes permissions, audit trails, and performance tracking, so that you can manage a team of producers much more effectively.

We’ve found that the most popular surveying software isn’t cloud-based, and so has none of cloud’s advantages:

1. You have to remember to manually mark your tasks complete, or check them back in, as a drafter. If your drafter is out for the day, you can't reliably access their work.
2. Other software is tied to a specific computer in a specific office — there's no way to work remotely, or to access your deliverables from a different computer, or to share your work with downstream clients.
3. Other software is slow and requires you to use a big beefy desktop workstation. There's an inherent limit to the size of the dataset that you can work with.
4. Many surveying applications release only one or two new versions every year. At Mach9, we release every two weeks, letting us continuously improve.
5. It's difficult to collaborate effectively on parts of your project with other surveying software. Even if you can break up your project into different pieces, you still have to work hard to join up the edges.
6. Many surveying and CAD software have strange version conflicts. You'll be stuck on version 2023 because none of your files open in the 2025 version.
7. Other surveying software crashes often enough that you learn to press the save button all the time.
8. It's very difficult to track drafters' work; most companies have their own homegrown solution on top of their software, or rely on management-by-walking-around (which breaks for overseas production teams).

In contrast, Mach9’s Digital Surveyor does all of these things — you can share datasets, you can access them from anywhere, we're quick to load large datasets, we release every two weeks, we have live collaboration, we're backwards compatible, your work is saved continuously, and we have our own task tracking solution. Even before talking about automation, Digital Surveyor’s cloud-first architecture changes how our customers do their work.

If you’re a surveyor frustrated that your data is stuck on someone else’s computer, book a demo with us!

And if you’re an engineer that wants to make CAD work in the cloud, with all the complexity that implies — reconciling multiple updates to complex geometry, serving and rendering gigabytes of point clouds over a network — we’re hiring.