Amar
Hanspal

One Hundred Calls a Day

Before the board rooms, before the billion-dollar market caps, before Autodesk's global cloud transformation - Amar Hanspal started his career answering customer support calls. One hundred of them a day. The frustration was live, the context was unfiltered, and the truth arrived in real time without a sales deck in the way.

That habit - going straight to the person holding the tool - is still how he thinks. Raised in multiple cities across India (Calcutta, Patna, Jamshedpur, Asansol, Bombay) as his father moved the family around on Esso's behalf, Hanspal arrived in the United States for graduate school and encountered his first major cultural shock. He absorbed it. His mechanical engineering degrees from the University of Bombay and Stony Brook University gave him a blueprint for how systems fit together. The customer calls gave him something harder to teach.

In 1987, he joined Autodesk - the company that put CAD software on every architect's desk - and spent the next three decades building it into something unrecognizable from the outside but intimately familiar from within. He left once, in 1999, and came back in 2002. The second stint lasted fifteen years and took him to the top.

Running the Machine That Runs Architecture

By the time Amar Hanspal became Co-CEO of Autodesk alongside Andrew Anagnost, he had touched nearly every corner of the company. Senior VP. Chief Product Officer. The man in charge of AutoCAD, then in charge of everything. Over 100 products. Over 10,000 employees. Revenue north of $2 billion across geographies that don't agree on much except that they all need building design software.

The transformation he is most credited with isn't the products - it's the business model. Moving a $8 billion company from perpetual software licenses to cloud subscriptions is the kind of thing that sounds straightforward in a McKinsey deck and looks terrifying in an earnings call. Hanspal and Anagnost did it. The company's market cap went from $8 billion to $24 billion in the process.

He left in 2017. Andrew Anagnost became sole CEO. Hanspal had been at the company for the better part of three decades across two stints. What he took with him was a working theory about what design software gets wrong - and the conviction that no one inside a company as large as Autodesk could fix it without starting from scratch.

Robots, Revenue, and a Graceful Exit

The first venture after Autodesk was Bright Machines, a San Francisco startup building AI-driven robotics for discrete manufacturing. Hanspal co-founded it in 2018 and took the CEO chair. Within two years, the company crossed $30 million in annual revenue. Investors including Eclipse Ventures, Geodesic Capital, and Flex poured in over $200 million.

In December 2021, Hanspal transitioned out of the CEO role as the company entered what a press release described as its "next phase of growth." The phrasing - familiar to anyone who reads startup PR - masks a genuine decision: Bright Machines was a manufacturing-automation bet. His real obsession had always been the design side. He had spent thirty years thinking about how buildings get designed. He wasn't done.

Building the Thing That Replaces the Thing He Helped Build

In 2023, Amar Hanspal co-founded Motif with Brian Mathews - a former Autodesk CTO and a key member of the original Revit development team. The irony is not accidental. If you want to know how Revit works at its foundations, Mathews does. If you want to know how Autodesk will defend it commercially, Hanspal does. Together they spent two years in stealth, working under the internal codename "AmBr," quietly signing up major global architecture firms to use the platform before anyone outside those firms knew it existed.

Motif launched publicly in February 2025. The pitch is direct: Revit, Autodesk's dominant BIM (Building Information Modeling) tool, was built for a world of desktop software. It is version-controlled through email attachments. Coordination happens in meetings. Visualization requires a separate rendering pipeline. Motif is none of those things.

Plans start at $50 per user per month. The target is the AEC industry - a sector that spends heavily on software, resents the vendor lock-in it lives inside, and has been told for years that a better solution is coming. Hanspal is betting he's finally the one delivering it.

$46 Million and Alphabet's Attention

On January 30, 2025, Motif announced $46 million in combined seed and Series A funding. CapitalG - Alphabet's independent growth fund - led the Series A. Redpoint Ventures led the seed round. The announcement came alongside the stealth exit: after two years of near-silence, Motif was suddenly on the front page of TechCrunch and Engineering News-Record in the same week.

The Forbes "Next Billion-Dollar Startups" designation followed. So did a spot on the 2025 AI Disruptors 60 list. For a company that had operated in near-total silence, the public launch produced an unusually concentrated burst of credentialing - which is either a sign of a well-managed narrative or a genuine signal that the market has been waiting for something exactly like this.

What He Actually Believes

Hanspal talks about execution the way some founders talk about vision. The idea is not the point. The iteration is. He watched hundreds of product ideas get proposed inside Autodesk over thirty years and learned something that is harder to articulate than it sounds: most of the time, the difference between a product that works and one that doesn't isn't the original concept. It's whether the team stayed curious and kept going after the first version failed.

On hiring, he says he tries to understand what actually motivates a candidate - not what they claim motivates them. He's looking for the ones who are solving the problem because they can't stop thinking about it, not the ones who are solving it because it's a good career move. This distinction, which sounds obvious, is apparently rare enough that he checks for it deliberately in every interview.

His cultural formation matters here. Growing up in India, moving between cities, arriving in New York for graduate school: the experience of being the new person in unfamiliar systems made him good at reading rooms and bad at assuming he already knew the answer. "In India, community surrounds you, supports you, and challenges you," he has said. "Education is heavily emphasized there, as it's generally the way people rise out of the middle class." He rose. And then kept going.

The Long Game