Michael Baron is Founder and CEO at Aurorin CAD, a next-generation mechanical CAD software company backed by Y Combinator (W26) that helps hardware companies ship faster. Aurorin built a custom AI-native CAD kernel from the ground up that creates parts in seconds compared to 20 minutes in traditional software like SolidWorks.

Michael was a 3x intern at SpaceX where he worked on Raptor combustion simulation, Dragon Guidance Navigation and Control, and Starshield flight software. He also interned at Apple working on GPU driver performance.

Michael participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch and launched Aurorin CAD in early 2026. The company is based in San Francisco and focuses on solving the speed and complexity problems plaguing legacy CAD software built on 1980s-era kernels.

Aurorin CAD raised $500K in seed funding from Y Combinator in January 2026. The company built a parametric and B-Rep driven CAD kernel optimized for modern CPUs and GPUs with integrated AI capabilities.

Aurorin's platform delivers execution speeds dramatically faster than legacy CAD systems, which commonly take 4 hours to open files. The AI-native architecture enables design engineers to prototype and iterate at unprecedented speeds, fundamentally transforming hardware development cycles.