Rayon, a collaborative design tool for the architecture, engineering and construction industries (AEC), announced it has raised €4 million in seed funding co-led by Northzone and existing investor Foundamental. Previous investor Seedcamp and angel investors, including legendary architect Norman Foster (Foster + Partners), also participated in the round. The funding will be used to expand the team as the software officially launches out of beta today and accelerates its go-to-market strategy.
Founded in 2021 by former civil servant and entrepreneur Bastien Dolla and architect and Machine Learning engineer Stanislas Chaillou, Rayon is on a mission to transform the AEC industries thanks to its collaborative design software. Currently, the majority of architecture design is conducted in silos, with designers limited to sharing PDFs via emails or printing out floor plans to annotate. This lack of efficient collaborative tools holds projects back and prevents the industry from progressing. Rayon was created to solve this challenge.
Bastien Dolla, co-founder at Rayon, said: “The architecture, engineering and construction industries are extremely fragmented, with projects at risk from delays and setbacks because designers and stakeholders can’t connect and collaborate with one another easily. Rayon is solving this by making it seamless for project partners to work together in real-time in an accessible browser-based platform. We’ve already seen our first users get brilliant results and we’re excited that teams across the world can now begin using Rayon. The support from our new investors, Northzone, and our previous investors Foundamental and Seedcamp, will be critical to scaling our product into the leading collaborative design tool for the built world.”
Rayon was founded to improve the design process by making it more collaborative and accessible to teams and stakeholders. As a browser-based tool, Rayon can be run from any operating system, anywhere, enabling teams to collaborate on 2D floor plans in real-time, making the process much faster and more agile. In a similar way that Figma brought interface design tools to the browser and improved collaboration, Rayon hopes to achieve the same technological shift for the AEC industries.
Stanislas Chaillou, co-founder at Rayon, said: “Rayon wants to serve the 90% of practitioners that the status quo of legacy software does not address. For small to midsize projects, BIM and CAD software offers an incomplete answer. In comparison, Rayon provides a “light-BIM” solution, blending features of both CAD and BIM worlds together, while adding a whole new layer of features, well beyond what legacy players can offer today. We believe Rayon hits a sweet spot for practitioners, for whom this in-between category had been missing for too long. Rayon is a truly web-first application with real-time collaboration and in-browser design experience, and we will soon be adding AI, a community platform and more so we can offer an even richer experience to our users.”
Since the 1980s, the architecture and construction software sector has been dominated by the same legacy software. Whilst these tools were groundbreaking at the time and have transformed how people design buildings, they have many limitations: such legacy tools are designed for high-performance, desktop computers, with studios having to fork out for expensive licenses, and restrictions on how they share and collaborate on a project. As a result, only using PDFs to share files makes it hard for professionals to transmit and share data, while the industry remains captive due to proprietary file formats.
Michiel Kotting, Partner at Northzone and joining Rayon’s board, commented: “There is a trend across productivity tooling of cloud-based, collaborative platforms supplanting overly complex legacy systems and broadening adoption to the long-tail of use cases; we saw this with Google Workspace for business documentation and Figma for product design. Rayon is bringing modern tools to the AEC industry, already showing powerful user enthusiasm.”
Rayon’s users can import a variety of files, including images, PDF, and CAD documents (DWG, DXF), and then get to work using its design and sharing features. From drawing and annotations to layouts and styling, Rayon has everything designers need to output their work from simple feasibility studies to detailed, rendered floor plans. One-click link sharing makes it easier than ever to work with colleagues and stakeholders to incorporate revisions and make changes based on real-time feedback instead of being locked away in email inboxes. Early customers have already reported that the platform makes their work up to three times faster, improving quality, efficiency and productivity.
Patric Hellermann, general partner at Foundamental, added: “Our economies and our lives happen in spaces. Spaces are one of the fundamental constraints to everything we do yet technology has not kept up. It’s unimaginable that the main way designers collaborate on critical base elements such as floor plans in 2023 is through printing off PDFs. Our thesis is simple: space gets designed all the time, it’s an inherently collaborative workflow that requires inputs and sign-offs and PDFs are the worst way to facilitate that workflow for architects and designers, which are one of the strongest communities out there. The reuse of community-generated content, baked into a multiplayer design tool like Rayon to facilitate workflows, is in high demand.”
