The designer who learned to run the machine - and now runs the company rewiring how the world buys, tracks and reuses furniture.
Walk into any interior design studio mid-project and you will find the same mess: AutoCAD in one window, an Excel schedule in another, a PowerPoint of mood boards, and a shared drive of PDFs that nobody trusts. Ellie Cunningham built her career learning to hate that mess. Today she runs the company trying to end it.
Cunningham is the Chief Executive Officer of Canoa, a Brooklyn-based design-technology company that lives inside a browser tab. The pitch is deceptively simple: put the mood board, the scaled floor plan, the real product data and the approval-ready furniture schedule on one canvas, so a designer stops copying numbers between five tools and starts, actually, designing. She took the top job in October 2024, stepping up from Chief Operating Officer after roughly a decade working shoulder-to-shoulder with founder Federico Negro.
Her thesis is unglamorous and exactly right: fix the data and you fix the workflow; fix the workflow and you can finally make sustainable, circular furniture the easy default instead of the heroic exception. FF&E - furniture, fixtures and equipment - is one of the most wasteful corners of the built environment. Perfectly good chairs and desks get ripped out and landfilled every time a lease turns over. Canoa's answer is to make every piece legible: where it came from, what it is made of, and whether it can live a second life.
Cunningham is careful about the loudest word in the room. "As a designer myself, I understand what is at stake with AI in our industry," she says, arguing for automation that lifts designers up and expands their creativity rather than quietly replacing it. It is the sort of line you can only earn by having done the work with your own hands first.
Great design should be accessible to all.
At WeWork she stopped drawing single rooms and started standing up the operations group behind thousands of designers. Rare crossover - and the reason she can now run a company, not just a studio.
She worked alongside Federico Negro for over ten years before he handed her the keys. He calls her the right leader for the next stage. That is not a hire; it is a conviction.
Her plan is to make Canoa the meeting point where designers, brands and even consumers all show up in one place. "The digital home," as she puts it, for a famously fragmented industry.
"As a designer myself, I understand what is at stake with AI in our industry."
"Canoa is quickly becoming the nexus of creativity for the interior design industry."
"Great design should be accessible to all."
The environmental case is the quiet engine under everything. Canoa was born to help decarbonize office buildings by bringing transparency to furniture, lighting and interior systems. Cunningham's version of the argument is operational, not preachy: if reuse is easier than replacement, people will reuse. The inventory tools exist so good furniture gets a second project instead of a dumpster.
Under her, the near-term ambitions are concrete - triple the users, sign marquee brand partnerships, and keep widening the on-ramp so any designer, not just the ones at big firms, can pull real product data into a real plan. The long game is bigger: a connected ecosystem where the sustainable choice is also the convenient one, because the data finally sits in one place.
It is a bet that boring infrastructure beats loud disruption. Spreadsheets do not trend. But the person who kills the spreadsheet, quietly, for an entire industry - that is a story worth watching.