To compete with Autodesk in the building design market, Snaptrude receives VC funding
Young company Snaptrude is seeking to unseat Autodesk in the architectural design market by offering consumers more advanced and comprehensive feature sets for less money. The New York City-based company's early success helped it attract thousands of clients and, most recently, seed capital.
The business is employing a strategy similar to Figma to take on a sector that has relied on decades-old code and where cloud-based collaboration is still elusive, having acquired $6.6 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundamental VC.
"The issue has been the industry's extremely archaic nature. Huge corporations like Autodesk, which developed software primarily in the 1990s, dominate the market. Therefore, the software stack is highly outdated, according to Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO of Snaptrude.
The widely used Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions, including Autodesk's Revit, have significant shortcomings. They need high-end computers and lack interoperability. In multiple open letters to the $40 billion Autodesk, architects, engineers, construction companies, and industry associations have voiced these worries with little to no result.
The giants are not being fought by Snaptrude alone. The same issue is being addressed by startups like Arcol, which we profiled in March of last year and which began operations in January 2021. According to Ganihar, Snaptrude is providing a complete solution to the market, in contrast to Arcol and other startups that would need a few years to release their goods.
In a full-stack scenario, "there are scarcely any players," he told TechCrunch.
After having a dreadful experience with legacy software while working on a national-level project to repair the UNESCO world heritage site Hampi in India's Karnataka, Ganihar, who has a background in computer graphics and computer vision research, got the idea to establish Snaptrude.
He first created plugins to integrate with already-existing software. However, the engineer began developing the concept for a cloud-based design tool in 2017. He presented his prototype at TechCrunch Disrupt that year, which increased his awareness and resulted in $1.2 million in initial funding in early 2018.
With the first funding, a team was able to be assembled to bring Snaptrude to life and add WeWork and Square Yards to its roster of more than 6,000 clients spread across more than 30 nations.
Snaptrude, which operates on a browser and provides collaboration for designing buildings in 3D as naturally as using Google Docs, offers an alternative to Revit and other legacy technologies. Additionally, it has the capability of producing real-time statistics to show how changing construction size affects costs, the environment, and energy use. All popular file types are supported by the platform, which has a freemium pricing model and supports DWG, RVT, IFC, SKP, FBX, PDF, and OBJ.
"Outdated software systems are currently holding back the AEC [architecture, engineering, and construction] business, and there hasn't been a modern cloud disruption. This is puzzling, especially in a field where cooperation between teams and experts is essential. Snaptrude is changing the game in this area by enabling actual cooperation and access to current data in a sizable, international market. According to a prepared statement by Partner at Accel Prashanth Prakash, "We are optimistic about Snaptrude's approach and category leadership moving forward.
The business has so far raised a total of $7.8 million. It intends to use the additional capital to improve its products and eventually commit money for further expansion. Clark Valberg, the founder of Invision, Possible Ventures, RFC, CapitalX, and Thilo Konzok all contributed to the all-equity seed round (co-founder Home).
35 people work for Snaptrude globally, including mathematicians and geometry engineers. In order to strengthen its market position, it intends to modestly grow the engineering staff this year.
In today's environment, online collaboration tools have become essential for organizations and professionals, and 3D design is no exception. This crucial requirement is being met by Snaptrude's innovative suite of collaboration design tools, which is also transforming workflows in the global AEC sector. Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Join at Foundamental, said, "We are happy to partner with Altaf and Snaptrude on their path to create a more collaborative world of 3D creation.
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