Design is intrinsically collaborative, especially in the built environment. However, there is no CAD software available for space designers. Because they primarily work with proprietary data maintained offline on your own desktop computer, the tools now on the market are expensive, heavy, and unduly complex, and they pose a barrier to teamwork in an industry that is intrinsically collaborative. As a result, the experts who design and manage our built environment are still grappling with pre-internet technologies.
Fundraise
Rayon, a space design software company has closed a $2M pre-seed round, which will be used to expand the Rayon team, enhance its product, and debut its service in October of this year.
Seedcamp led the round, which also included Foundamental, 20VC, and Kima. Ralph Gootee, co-founder of plangrid (acquired by Autodesk); Joe Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Loom; Thibaud Elziere and Quentin Nickmans, founders of eFounders; Nicolas Steegmann, co-founder of Stupeflix; Riggs Kubiak, founder of Honest buildings (acquired by Procore); Jonathan Widawski, founder and CEO of Maze, and others also participated in it.
The inception
Bastien Dolla and Stanislas Chaillou co-founded Rayon in October 2021. The company offers online design software that allows users to draw, share, and collaborate on floor plans in their browser from anywhere. This is in accordance with how space design is increasingly done: in groups, at a quick pace, and in regular communication with different disciplines and experts.
Rayon’s founding team has extensive knowledge in browser-based technologies, AI, real estate, and architecture. Rayon is now in closed beta and has already been embraced by category leaders such as Wojo, Colonies and others. Rayon is used in a variety of applications (commercial real estate, housing, interior space planning, furniture manufacturing, asset management, and so on), demonstrating that user-friendly, collaborative, and quick space design tools are in high demand for a wide range of people in our industry and beyond.
Bastien Dolla, co-founder at Rayon says, “There are more than 30M people working on floor plans every day. Currently most of them are stuck with static pdf files that they cannot edit, measure and or update in real time. We believe we can do much better than that ! Our goal is for Rayon to become the fastest and simplest way to work on floor plans as a team”.
Stanislas Chaillou, co-founder at Rayon says, ”Rayon places today a bet: building the next generation of space design platform. Laying out today the foundation for an online ecosystem is to us the stepping towards offering tomorrow the best technology can offer to our industry (API integrations, smart drawing tools, community-curated content, and more)”.
Tom Wilson, Partner at Seedcamp says, “Space Design is fundamentally collaborative, but the current CAD software offering is not: these tools are not only expensive, heavy and too complex, but they also represent a barrier to team work in this industry.”
