About us
Toolpaths designed for the machine you actually have.
DigitalCNC is a software company specialising in physics-based machining intelligence for aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
We use advanced mathematics and control systems to predict how a specific machine and process will behave — inside the CAM environment, before a part is cut. The result is toolpaths that are genuinely machine-specific, not just generically optimised.
We were born out of decades of research at the AMRC and exist to close the gap between what a CAM programmer programs and what actually happens on the machine.
Our mission
Programmes that are right for your machines, before they ever run.
Our mission is to give CAM engineers and manufacturing engineers the machine-specific intelligence they need to design better toolpaths — reducing scrap, shortening lead times, and cutting the cost of prove-out. We do that by embedding physics-based prediction directly into the CAM workflow.
The co-founders
Built in production, not in a lab.
Rob and David bring advanced machining and machine tool research from the AMRC and direct experience in aerospace manufacturing programmes.
Dr Rob Ward
CEO and Co-Founder
Rob is CEO and Co-Founder of DigitalCNC, a digital manufacturing software spin-out from the University of Sheffield and the AMRC. A Chartered Engineer and ex-Forces, he founded the Robotics and Autonomous Manufacturing Systems (RAMS) Lab at Sheffield, where he continues as a Senior Industrial Research Fellow. His research in machine tool control and digital twins has been nationally recognised, and DigitalCNC was named Start-up of the Year at both the 2025 Sheffield Business Awards and the Yorkshire Post Business Awards.
David Wilkinson
CTO and Co-Founder
David is CTO and Co-Founder of DigitalCNC, where he leads the company’s technical strategy and the development of its proprietary IP. He is concurrently a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield, working jointly with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the AMRC on toolpath trajectory generation and optimisation — the research that underpins the DigitalCNC platform. He previously held a software and control systems role at Caterpillar.
The team
Yorkshire AI Labs have been with us from the start — building the platform alongside us and scaling as we scale.
David Richards MBE
Director, Yorkshire AI Labs
David is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Yorkshire AI Labs, the early-stage AI investment platform backing builders across the North of England. He previously founded WANdisco, the distributed computing company he scaled from nothing to a billion-dollar market cap, and has built and exited businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. He was appointed MBE in 2022 for services to young people and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University.
The advisory board
Backed by the people who built modern UK manufacturing research.
Culture & team
Small, focused, and deliberate.
We’re a small, focused team. That’s deliberate. We work directly with partners, move fast on problems that matter, and don’t carry overhead that doesn’t add value to the product.
We combine deep manufacturing domain knowledge with modern software engineering. If you understand CNC machining and want to work on genuinely hard problems at the intersection of physics and data, we’d like to hear from you.