Rayon raises $2m pre-seed to provide next generation collaborative space design software
Rayon, the space design software makers, today announce the successful completion of a $2m pre-seed round, which will be used to grow the Rayon team, refine its product and launch its offering in October of this year.
The round was led by Seedcamp, alongside Foundamental, 20VC, and Kima. They are also joined by a cohort of business angels including, 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 & CEO of Maze, as well as many others.
Design, especially for the built environment, is fundamentally collaborative. However, CAD software offering available to space designers is not. The tools currently on the market are expensive, heavy and overly complex, and because they mainly work with proprietary files saved offline on your local desktop computer, they represent a barrier to teamwork, in what is an inherently collaborative industry. Therefore, the professionals who design and run our built environment still wrestle with software from the pre-internet era.
This is the problem Rayon wants to solve. The company provides online design software that allows users anywhere to draw, share and work together on floor plans directly in their browser. This supports the way that space design increasingly functions: in teams, at a fast pace, and in constant dialogue with other disciplines and expertise. Rayon’s mission is to create tools that support this reality. By speeding up the design phase, gathering teams around a single source of truth, and replacing time-consuming cross-platform workflows, current users have experienced working up to three times faster than previously.
Bastien Dolla, co-founder at Rayon says, “There are more than 30 millions 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”
Patric Hellermann, general partner at Foundamental says, “Rayon is betting on a more accessible way to design spaces and floor plans: 2D over 3D, browser-based over desktop-based, and multiplayer over single-player. The space-design market is today constrained by 30 year old 3D legacy software that is inaccessible for the vast majority of casual space designers. Rayon attacks an addressable market of 15m casual space designers – in monetary terms, a market north of $10bn.
