Autodesk

Autodesk makes software for designing and making physical things and digital worlds. Its fiscal 2026 10-K reports four product families. AECO, the largest, is architecture, engineering, construction and operations: Revit, Civil 3D, the AEC Collection and the construction cloud (Autodesk Build, Docs, BuildingConnected), now named Forma for Construction. AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT are their own family. Manufacturing is Fusion, Inventor, Vault and the Product Design & Manufacturing Collection. Media and Entertainment, the smallest, is Maya, 3ds Max and Flow Production Tracking. It reports one segment.

The technology has three layers. Desktop applications, many decades old, do the heavy modeling on a user's workstation, mostly on Windows. File formats bind the industries together: DWG for drawings, Revit's RVT for building models. And a newer cloud layer, Autodesk Platform Services, stores data, runs collaboration (BIM Collaborate Pro, Fusion's cloud files, Docs) and lets other developers build on it. Autodesk describes its direction as moving from files to granular data in a shared data model, organized as three industry clouds: Forma, Fusion and Flow.

Its users are professionals whose skills are tied to its tools: drafters, architects, engineers, machinists and 3D artists. Students get free licenses, so graduates arrive knowing AutoCAD, Revit, Fusion or Maya, and firms hire for those skills. Projects tie firms together too: when the architect works in Revit, the engineers and contractor usually do as well.

Autodesk is changing how it sells: from resellers to direct sales through its online store and a new transaction model, in which partners quote and Autodesk bills the customer. Revenue through its largest distributor, TD Synnex, fell sharply as a share of the total as a result.

Revenue was $7.21B in fiscal 2026 (the year to January 31, 2026), up 17.5%, and has grown about 13.7% a year over five years.

For a design firm, leaving Autodesk means changing the format of its work, not just its software. An architecture firm's projects, templates, families and details are in Revit; an engineering firm's decades of drawings, blocks and LISP routines are in AutoCAD; a studio's pipeline is scripted around Maya. Moving to Archicad, BricsCAD, SolidWorks or Blender means converting or rebuilding that library, retraining staff who are billed by the hour, and losing productivity while they relearn.

The bigger tie is other people. Project partners exchange DWG and Revit files; clients and governments write BIM requirements around them; job candidates list Autodesk skills. A firm that leaves alone has to translate files for every project.

Customers do move at the edges. Price increases and licensing changes push small firms to BricsCAD, DraftSight or Archicad; freelancers and small studios choose Blender; startups pick Onshape or SolidWorks; contractors run projects in Procore. In each case the move is easiest where a person works alone and hardest where a team exchanges files with others every day.

Autodesk's numbers show its switch from selling perpetual licenses to subscriptions. As upfront license sales stopped, revenue fell 18.9% to $2.03B in fiscal 2017, and the operating margin was -24.6% that year and -24.8% in fiscal 2018. Once the subscriptions built up, revenue more than tripled to $7.21B by fiscal 2026 and operating margin reached 21.9%, with operating income of $1.58B.

Desktop software delivered by download, with a modest cloud layer, costs little to provide: gross margin was 91.0% in fiscal 2026, and capital spending just $0.04B. The main costs are research and development and selling, including fees to partners under the new transaction model.

Cash follows billing terms. When Autodesk moved multi-year contracts from upfront to annual billing, free cash flow fell to $1.28B in fiscal 2024 from $2.03B a year earlier; it was $2.41B in fiscal 2026 (33.4% of revenue), or $1.62B after equity pay of $0.79B (10.9% of revenue). Autodesk ended fiscal 2026 with $2.50B of debt and $2.60B of cash and short-term investments, about even.

Autodesk's long project is to move its customers from files to data. Today a building or a product is a stack of files that each application opens whole; Autodesk is building a shared data model in the cloud, organized as three industry clouds: Forma for architecture, engineering and construction, Fusion for design and manufacturing, and Flow for media and entertainment. The aim is that an architect's change, a contractor's issue and an owner's maintenance record all reach the same model without exporting files, and that AI can work on that data.

Construction is one of its main areas of growth outside design: the renaming of Construction Cloud to Forma for Construction ties field work to the design models. In manufacturing, Fusion is where new features land, aimed at startups and small manufacturers first. AI features (automating drawings, suggesting designs, generating 3D content) are being built into each cloud.

The sales change is nearly done. With the new transaction model, Autodesk sells to most customers directly, sets one price, and knows who its users are, which it uses to sell more products to them. It also ended fiscal 2026 with fewer people than a year before, by its 10-K, as it moved work toward these priorities.

• Moving from files to data without breaking anyone. Customers depend on Revit, AutoCAD and Inventor files every day; a cloud data model has to work with decades of files and firms' existing workflows, or they will not move.
• Revit's age. Large firms have complained publicly about its performance and slow development relative to its price. Newer BIM tools built for the cloud, and Archicad, are ready for firms that lose patience.
• Blender. In media and entertainment a free, fast-improving tool now trains the next generation of artists.
• Strong specialists in every market. Dassault's SolidWorks and PTC's Onshape in product design, Procore in construction, Bentley in infrastructure, Nemetschek in building design.
• Pricing and licensing. The end of perpetual licenses, the move to named users and repeated price rises have strained relations with small firms, and unlicensed use is common in some markets.
• AI. If AI can generate drawings, models or animations from a description, the hours professionals spend in Autodesk's tools, and how many seats firms need, could change.