Snaptrude, a young startup, is trying to disrupt Autodesk in the building design space, providing customers with modern and broader sets of features at a more affordable price. The company’s early progress with headquarters in New York City has helped it court thousands of clients and now seed capital.
The startup — which raised $6.6 million in seed funding led by Accel and Foundamental VC — is taking a similar approach to Figma to address an industry that relies on decades-old code and where cloud-based collaboration is still elusive. is .
“The problem has been that the industry is very backward in nature. It’s dominated by companies like Autodesk, giant corporations, software built largely in the 90s. So the software stack is very old,” said Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO of Snaptrudein an interview.
Popular Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions, including Autodesk’s Revit, have lagged behind in many areas. They lack interoperability and require advanced computers. Architects, engineers, construction companies and industry groups have raised these concerns in countless open letters to the $40 billion Autodesk with little to no success.
Snaptrude isn’t alone in taking on the giants. Startups, including Arcol, which launched in January 2021 and which we covered in March last year, are also trying to solve the same problem with their models. Ganihar said Snaptrude offers a full-fledged solution to the market, which differs from Arcol and other startups that take a few years to get their products to market.
“There are hardly any players in a full-stack scenario,” he told businessroundups.org.
Ganihar, who has a research background in computer graphics and computer vision, came up with the idea to start Snaptrude after he had a terrible experience with outdated software while working on a national level project to build the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hampi in Karnataka, India, to reconstruct.
He initially built plug-ins to work with existing software. But in 2017, the engineer started prototyping the idea of a cloud-based design tool. He showcased his prototype at businessroundups.org Disrupt that year, which earned him some visibility and brought in initial funding of $1.2 million in early 2018.
The initial funding helped build a team to make Snaptrude a reality, adding companies like WeWork and Square Yards to its list of more than 6,000 customers in more than 30 countries around the world.
Unlike Revit and other legacy solutions, Snaptrude works in a browser and offers collaboration for designing buildings in 3D as naturally as using Google Docs. It also offers the possibility to generate real-time data to inform about the impact of changing building size on costs, climate and energy consumption. In addition, available in a freemium model, the platform supports all common file formats, including DWG, RVT, IFC, SKP, FBX, PDF, and OBJ.
“The AEC [architecture, engineering and construction] the industry is currently held back by outdated software systems and has not undergone modern cloud disruption. This is mind-boggling, especially in an industry that requires collaboration between teams and specialists. This is where Snaptrude changes the game: enabling true collaboration and access to real-world data in a massive, global marketplace. We are optimistic about Snaptrude’s strategy and leadership in the category ahead,” Prashanth Prakash, Partner at Accel, said in a prepared statement.
The startup has raised a total of $7.8 million to date. It plans to use the new money to make product improvements and ultimately implement and allocate money for future growth. The all-equity seed round also saw participation from Possible Ventures, Clark Valberg (founder, Invision), RFC, CapitalX and Thilo Konzok (co-founder Home).
Snaptrude has a global workforce of 35, including geometry engineers and mathematicians. It plans to expand the technical team slightly this year to strengthen its presence in the market.
“Online collaboration tools have become a necessity for businesses and professionals in today’s landscape and 3D design is no different. Snaptrude’s forward-thinking suite of collaborative design tools addresses this vital need while revolutionizing AEC industry workflows around the world. We are excited to partner with Altaf and Snaptrude on their journey to create a more collaborative world of 3D design,” said Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Partner at Foundamental.
