Nathan
Henderson

The ProfileThe Man Working to Retire the Paper Diagram

There is a folded sheet of paper inside every box you have ever opened. It has diagrams that reference parts labeled A through K. You are supposed to find them in the little plastic bag. You do not. Nathan Henderson, chairman and CEO of BILT Incorporated, has spent the last decade turning that sheet of paper into a software company. Depending on how you count, roughly 300 brands now agree with him, including Siemens, Weber, Assa Abloy, Chamberlain, Genie, Solo Stove, Whalen and The Home Depot.

BILT is what happens when a manufacturer hands over a CAD file and a SaaS company hands it back as an interactive 3D experience: pinch-and-zoom, step-by-step, in your phone, and now in Apple Vision Pro. The company is headquartered in a low-slung building on Nolen Drive in Grapevine, Texas, a short drive from DFW airport and considerably farther, culturally, from the venture theater of Sand Hill Road. It has 82 employees. It closed a $21 million Series B in December 2024, bringing total funding to about $34 million, and it has been on the Inc. 5000 twice, most notably in 2021 with three-year revenue growth of 750 percent.

The concept was born inside SAP, where Henderson spent 17 years. He was hired out of the Thunderbird School of Global Management's MBA program in 1999, did a first tour through SAP Labs in various product and consulting roles, then came back in 2008 for a second stretch that included stints as Sr. Director & Principal for Enterprise Mobility and Global Lead for Partner Quality Programs. It was during that second stretch that he ran what SAP called "BILT" inside its innovation and user-experience incubator. In 2015, he and co-founders Ahmed Qureshi and Paul Ratcliffe walked the concept out and set up shop.

You would not build the founder from central casting. Henderson grew up in Saudi Arabia, where he met Qureshi when both were five years old. He co-founded, in 1987, a childhood venture called The Brothers Popsicles. In 1990 he served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico, where he picked up fluent Spanish. He went to Brigham Young University for a degree in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. He worked at Nu Skin as a forecast analyst and inventory auditor before Thunderbird. He is married with three college-age children (two at BYU, one who was on a mission in Chile when Henderson last publicly mentioned it). His personal hobbies, per interviews, are scuba diving, hiking and staying physically fit. This is not a founder profile that reads like a TechCrunch template. It reads like a resume that arrived by fax.

The ProductCAD in, Customer Out

The pitch, when Henderson gives it, is deceptively small. BILT converts manufacturers' CAD data into cloud-based 3D instructional experiences, which end users open on a phone, tablet or, increasingly, a spatial computing headset. The steps are interactive. You rotate the object. You watch a screw thread itself in. When you are done, the app helpfully offers to store your receipt and warranty. The revealed preference in the market is that people prefer this to the fax-era diagram.

The revealed preference among BILT's brand partners is bigger than that. The reason a company like Weber pays for BILT is that BILT converts something ambiently painful (customer support calls, one-star Amazon reviews about assembly, product returns) into something measurable. BILT's marketing runs heavily on Net Promoter Score. Fred Reichheld, the man who invented NPS, has posted about Henderson on LinkedIn. The mission statement, from BILT's own materials: "BILT creates an experience so enabling and empowering, it transforms users into promoters of the brands we serve." Which is to say: they measure how much you love the product after you have assembled it, and they take credit for the delta.

The Apple Vision Pro extension, which Deloitte flagged in a 2025 white paper on spatial computing in manufacturing, is a natural extension. If the value proposition is "we are the layer between engineering and customer," then wherever the customer is looking is where BILT should be. Right now that is a phone. In five years it may not be.

The Business QuestionHow Do You Get Weber to Give You Their CAD Files?

The interesting question about BILT is not technical. Turning a CAD file into a 3D interactive experience is not, in 2026, a research problem. The interesting question is commercial. How do you get 300 industrial and consumer brands, most of whom treat their engineering drawings as proprietary, to hand them over to a small Grapevine SaaS company?

The answer, based on Henderson's public interviews, has three components. The first is that BILT does not treat the CAD file as the product. It treats the customer relationship as the product. The manufacturer keeps the drawings; BILT ingests them, produces the instruction experience, and manages the version control when the manufacturer ships an updated product. The second is that BILT bundles analytics: which step do users get stuck on, where do they abandon, what is the actual real-world assembly time? These are answers that the manufacturer's engineering team wants and has never had. The third is that BILT was born inside SAP, which means Henderson knows how to sell to procurement departments at 100-year-old industrial companies. This is a nontrivial skill.

Whether the resulting business is a $100M ARR company, a $1B ARR company, or something else, is what the 2024 Series B is designed to find out. Silverton Partners has been an investor since at least the 2021 expansion round of $9 million. The cap table has grown, but not dramatically. Henderson still runs the company he founded.

The FounderWhat Ten Years at BILT Looks Like

Henderson does not appear to be in a hurry. He has been at this for a decade. He has done the podcasts (Code Story, Constructed Futures, People First Then Construction), the trade press interviews (MarketScale, PRNewswire), and the LinkedIn cadence. His interviews are notably light on venture-founder cliche. He talks about brand partners, about NPS, about customer experience as a moral category. When he mentions his co-founder, he almost always mentions Saudi Arabia. When he mentions his family, he mentions his kids' schools.

The BILTapp Instagram account (which Henderson does not personally run, but which shares his interviews) recently posted footage of him sitting down with Ben Thomas for MarketScale. He looks, in the still, like a man who has had a very consistent job for a very long time. Which he has.

The company is not particularly loud. It does not run outrage marketing. It does not chase headlines. It shows up on the Inc. 5000, in Deloitte white papers, and in the folded paper insert that is being quietly replaced. Henderson's ambition, as best it can be read from public materials, is to make BILT the default layer between "manufacturer" and "person opening the box." That is a big surface. He has ten years of runway on it, roughly $34 million in outside capital, and a friend from age five as his co-founder. The paper diagram, meanwhile, is not getting any smarter.