Most of the software architects use to design the buildings around us was written before the smartphone existed. Revit, AutoCAD, SketchUp - the workhorses of the drafting room - trace their lineage to the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era of desktop licenses, file handoffs and versions saved to a shared drive. Snaptrude, founded in 2017 by Altaf Ganihar, is a bet that this era is ending.
The company builds a cloud-based, AI-native design platform for architecture, engineering and construction - the sprawling sector the industry shorthands as AEC. Its pitch is deceptively simple: keep everything in one connected model. Site analysis, space programming, massing, BIM modeling and presentation drawings live together in a single browser-based workspace, updating in real time as a team works, the way a spreadsheet recalculates the moment you change a cell.
That "one connected model" language is not just marketing. In a typical architecture office, an early design might bounce between a napkin sketch, a SketchUp study, a Rhino surface, a Revit model and a stack of PDFs - and lose fidelity at every jump. Snaptrude's core promise is that it can import from Revit, Rhino, SketchUp and PDF without breaking the model, and export back to Revit without the usual data degradation.
Ganihar did not come to this from architecture. His background is in geometry research and computer vision. The idea arrived sideways: while reconstructing a UNESCO World Heritage site in 3D, he worked alongside architects and noticed how much of their time was spent fighting their tools rather than designing. What began as a hobbyist SketchUp plugin - one that unexpectedly attracted paying customers - grew into the conviction that design belonged in the cloud.
Building it was not easy. Running CAD in a browser meant solving a problem the desktop incumbents never had to: the fundamental geometry kernels that power design software simply weren't available for the web. Snaptrude spent years building what wasn't there. It is the kind of quiet technical work that looks unremarkable until a competitor tries to copy it.
Investors were not immediately convinced either. One early backer has recalled saying "no" several times before eventually committing. Ganihar himself was rejected from a Stanford PhD program before deciding to build the company full time - a decision he says took a year and a half of deliberation.
