Paris-based Rayon, a collaborative design tool for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, announced on Wednesday that it has secured €4M in a seed round of funding.
The investment was co-led by Northzone and existing investor Foundamental. Previous investor Seedcamp and renowned architect Norman Foster (Foster + Partners) also participated in the funding round.
Strategic angels participating in the round also include Rasmus Andersson (early design employee at Spotify and Figma), Adam Wiggins (co-founder of Heroku), David Basulto (founder and CEO of ArchDaily), and David Apple (early employee at TypeForm and Notion).
Brief about Rayon
Founded in 2021 by Bastien Dolla and Stanislas Chaillou, Rayon aims to transform the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries with its collaborative design software.
Traditionally, AEC design work has been isolated, hindering efficient collaboration. Rayon’s mission is to provide a solution to this challenge and promote progress in the industry by offering a platform for streamlined collaboration among professionals in AEC.
Stanislas Chaillou, co-founder of Rayon, says, “Rayon wants to serve the 90 per cent 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,” says Chaillou.
A collaborative space design software
According to Rayon, legacy software has long dominated the architecture and construction sector, but they come with limitations like high costs, restricted collaboration, and reliance on PDFs for file sharing.
These constraints have kept the industry captive to proprietary file formats, hindering progress in adopting more modern and collaborative design approaches.
Rayon was created to transform the design process in the AEC industries. It offers a browser-based tool that facilitates real-time collaboration on 2D floor plans, making the process faster and more agile.
Similar to how Figma brought interface design, Rayon aims to bring a similar technological shift to the AEC sector by making design tools more accessible and collaborative.
Rayon offers a versatile platform for architecture design that allows users to import various file formats, including images, PDF, and CAD documents (DWG, DXF), and provides a wide range of design and sharing features.
This includes drawing, annotations, layouts, and styling, enabling the creation of everything from feasibility studies to detailed floor plans. One-click link sharing facilitates real-time collaboration, reducing the need for email exchanges and improving efficiency.
The company mentions in a statement that early users have reported up to three times faster work completion, enhancing quality and productivity in the architecture and construction industry.
Rayon, originally designed to address the needs of architects and interior designers, has broader applications across industries such as real estate, landscaping, hospitality, logistics, and urban planning.
Capital utilisation
Rayon says it will use the funds to expand its team and accelerate its go-to-market strategy as it officially launches its software out of beta.
Co-founder Bastien Dolla says, “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,” adds Dolla.
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