design-automation
(12)
Altaf Ganihar
A geometry researcher met the limits of old design software at Hampi. His response was Snaptrude - a browser-native attempt to make building design collaborative, connected and easier to revise.
Foyr
Foyr is a cloud-based, AI-powered interior design platform whose flagship product, Foyr Neo, lets designers, architects, contractors and students go from 2D floor plans to photorealistic 3D renders and interactive walkthroughs inside a web browser - no heavy CAD skills or high-end hardware required. Founded in 2014 by former Microsoft director Shailesh Goswami, the company positions itself as an all-in-one alternative to stitched-together tools like SketchUp, V-Ray and Photoshop, with a library of tens of thousands of 3D furniture models and rendering that runs in the cloud. Foyr says more than 150,000 creators worldwide use the platform.
Snaptrude
Snaptrude is a cloud-based, AI-native design platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) teams. It lets architects move from a brief to a BIM-ready model inside one connected, browser-based workspace - handling site analysis, space programming, massing, BIM modeling and presentation while staying interoperable with legacy tools like Revit, Rhino and Archicad. Founded in 2017 by Altaf Ganihar and backed by Foundamental and Accel, Snaptrude positions itself as a modern, collaborative alternative to design software largely built in the late 1990s.
Aditazz, Inc.
Aditazz is a Silicon Valley technology company that borrows the automated, rule-based workflows of semiconductor chip design and applies them to the design and construction of complex buildings. Its SaaS platform captures human engineering and architectural expertise as design rules, then uses algorithms and digital twins to generate, simulate and optimize building layouts before a single wall is built. Founded in 2010 by chip designer Deepak Aatresh and architect Zigmund Rubel, the company first targeted healthcare facilities - winning Kaiser Permanente's 'Small Hospital, Big Idea' competition - and has since applied its methods to hospitals, labs, and other infrastructure across the U.S., China and India.
Napkin AI
Napkin AI turns plain text into editable visuals - diagrams, flowcharts, infographics, mind maps - in about five seconds. Built by two ex-Google engineers who previously co-founded the children's learning platform Osmo, Napkin uses an orchestrator LLM and a 'design agency' of specialized sub-agents to do the work most knowledge workers used to outsource to a designer or a PowerPoint smart-art menu.
Symetri USA
Symetri USA - formerly Microdesk - is an Autodesk-focused technology consultancy serving the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industry. Founded in 1994 and acquired by Sweden's Symetri (an Addnode Group company) in 2022, it helps design, construction and asset-owner teams work smarter through BIM, VDC, digital twins, enterprise asset management and its own Naviate software line. Together with its European parent, Symetri is the #1 Global Autodesk Solution Provider, serving more than 20,000 customers and 250,000 daily users with a stated mission of efficient, sustainable design.
Foundation EGI
Foundation EGI is an MIT CSAIL spinout building what it calls Engineering General Intelligence: a domain-specific, agentic AI platform purpose-built for industrial engineering and manufacturing. Instead of treating engineering as text, it encodes the rules of physics, geometry, materials, and manufacturing constraints into a domain-specific language, turning messy specs and CAD models into auditable, executable workflows for technical drawings, process planning, product catalogs, and multilingual documentation. The company raised an oversubscribed $23M Series A in July 2025, bringing total funding past $30M.
JITX
JITX is a Berkeley- and San Jose-based software company building a code-driven, AI-assisted platform for circuit board design. Instead of dragging parts around a canvas by hand, electrical engineers describe what a board must do in code, and JITX selects components, places parts, routes traces, and checks the design against electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing rules. Spun out of UC Berkeley and backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, the company is used by hardware teams at firms like Honeywell Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, OpenAI, and HP, who report 5-20x productivity gains on complex multi-layer designs.
Raspberry AI
Raspberry AI is a New York-based generative AI platform built specifically for fashion creatives. It turns sketches, text prompts and 3D files into retail-ready imagery - mood boards, lifestyle and product photography, on-body try-ons and technical drawings - in minutes rather than weeks, replacing the slow, sample-heavy design workflow that has defined apparel for decades. Founded by Cheryl Liu and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, it counts Under Armour, MCM Worldwide, Li & Fung and Gruppo Teddy among its customers.
Cheryl Liu
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Synopsys Inc
Synopsys is the quiet giant behind the world's chips. Its electronic design automation (EDA) software, semiconductor IP, and AI-driven design tools are used to design and verify nearly every advanced silicon chip on the planet - from smartphone processors to AI accelerators. Founded in 1986 by Aart de Geus and led today by CEO Sassine Ghazi, the Sunnyvale company turned the impossibly hard task of laying out billions of transistors into a software problem, and now layers AI on top of it. Its 2025 acquisition of simulation leader Ansys pushed it deeper into multiphysics and systems engineering.
Hardik Kabaria
Hardik Kabaria is Co-Founder and CEO of Vinci4D.ai (now getvinci.ai), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a physics foundation model that makes hardware simulation 1000x faster than traditional finite element analysis. A Stanford PhD in Mechanics and Computation, he spent eight years at Carbon - the 3D printing unicorn - rising from software engineer to CXO before founding Vinci in 2023. His company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M raised from Xora Innovation, Khosla Ventures, and Eclipse, already deployed with three leading semiconductor manufacturers and validated by over half the world's top 20 chip companies.