Rayon Secures €4 Million in Funding to Revolutionize Architectural Design Collaboration

Rayon, a France-based start-up specializing in collaborative architectural design tools for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, has announced the successful completion of a €4 million seed funding round. The funding was co-led by Northzone, a leading European venture capital firm, and Foundamental, an existing investor in Rayon. Other participants in the funding round included Seedcamp and a group of angel investors, including the renowned architect Norman Foster of Foster + Partners.

Rayon, founded in 2021 by Bastien Dolla, a former civil servant, and Stanislas Chaillou, an architect and Machine Learning engineer, aims to revolutionize the AEC industries by addressing a critical challenge: the lack of efficient collaborative tools in the design process. Currently, architectural design often occurs in isolated silos, with professionals relying on emails or printed floor plans for communication. Rayon seeks to bridge this gap by providing a seamless, browser-based platform for real-time collaboration among project partners.

Bastien Dolla, co-founder of Rayon, emphasized the fragmented nature of the AEC industries, stating, “Rayon is solving this by making it seamless for project partners to work together in real-time in an accessible browser-based platform.” The software allows teams to collaborate on 2D floor plans from any operating system, making the design process faster and more agile.

Stanislas Chaillou, co-founder of Rayon, explained that the company’s goal is to serve the needs of the vast majority of practitioners who find traditional CAD and BIM software inadequate for small to midsize projects. Rayon offers a “light-BIM” solution, combining features from both CAD and BIM worlds while introducing innovative features not found in legacy software.

Rayon’s platform enables users to import various file types, including images, PDFs, and CAD documents, and provides tools for drawing, annotations, layouts, and styling. The platform’s one-click link sharing simplifies collaboration and real-time feedback, significantly improving productivity.

Michiel Kotting, Partner at Northzone, noted the trend of cloud-based, collaborative platforms replacing complex legacy systems in productivity tooling. Rayon, with its modern approach, is poised to transform the AEC industry by enhancing collaboration and productivity.

Patric Hellermann, General Partner at Foundamental, stressed the need for modernizing architectural design collaboration. He stated, “It’s unimaginable that the main way designers collaborate on critical base elements such as floor plans in 2023 is through printing off PDFs.”

With its new funding, Rayon plans to expand its team and accelerate its go-to-market strategy as it officially launches out of beta, paving the way for a new era of collaborative architectural design in the AEC industry.