Rebuilding BIM: Snaptrude

Posted on April 16, 2025 at April 15, 2025 by AEC Magazine

6 0

We ask five leading AEC software developers and four startups to share their observations and projections for BIM 2.0

Beyond Legacy Thinking
Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, Snaptrude

Beyond the Familiar Crisis: Understanding the Root Cause

We’ve all seen the reports. We know the AEC industry struggles with productivity. We’ve read the McKinsey statistics and heard about budget overruns countless times. Yet despite this awareness, the same problems persist.

Why? I believe we’re focusing on symptoms rather than the disease. The real issue isn’t just poor collaboration, it’s a broken information chain throughout the building lifecycle.

Think about it: decisions made during early design affect a building for decades. These choices impact construction costs, energy use, maintenance expenses, and occupant health. Yet our current systems break this chain at every link, especially in the critical early stages where decisions have the most impact.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2025 Edition of AEC Magazine

👉 Subscribe FREE here 👈

The three-dimensional disconnect

The AEC industry suffers from what I call a “three-dimensional disconnect” that prevents smart decision-making:

Disconnected tools: Our industry uses specialised software that’s great at specific tasks but terrible at talking to each other. Existing tools force design teams to wait weeks to bring designs up to basic specifications before gathering feedback. Even tools from the same company often can’t share information without someone manually converting the data.
Fragmented data: Critical building information is scattered across dozens of systems in incompatible formats. Requirements, floor plans, 3D models, renders, and presentations exist as separate files in separate programs. This makes it nearly impossible to see how a change in one area affects everything else.
Isolated people: Most importantly, our technology keeps experts apart when they need to work together. For an industry that thrives on collaboration, with multiple stakeholders working across geographies, there’s no reliable platform for real-time collaboration. Architects, engineers, clients, and contractors use different systems that reinforce silos instead of breaking them down.

In an industry where the impact lasts for years, this lack of actionable feedback and limited collaboration causes decisions to get severely delayed, resulting in massive cost implications for retrospective corrections.

The cloud-native foundation

Seven years ago, we began with a dream of a connected ecosystem for the AEC industry, which evolved into our mission to connect people, data, and tools. We recognised that this would only be possible by building natively in the cloud.

This cloud-native foundation enables several critical capabilities:

Universal representation of data across the lifecycle, enabling:
– Atomic changes to designs with real-time feedback on cost, climate, and carbon impact
– Seamless interoperability with legacy tools to enable easy transition from old workflows to new
A powerful geometry kernel optimised for web-based editing
Practical automations that enhance rather than complicate the design process

Today, I’m encouraged to see the entire industry, including incumbents and startups alike, converging on this worldview. The debate is no longer about whether we need a connected ecosystem, but how quickly we can create one and what specific approaches will work best.

Reimagining the early design process

We recognised that the most critical phase in a building’s lifecycle is the early design stage, from RFP analysis to schematic design. This is where the most impactful decisions are made, yet it’s also where our disconnected tools create the greatest financial strain on firms.

According to a recent AIA report, 15% of the work that architecture firms do is not compensated, a staggering amount of lost revenue. Much of this unpaid work occurs during early design phases, which have become increasingly unprofitable. While incumbents are rushing to rebuild legacy systems on the cloud, this approach misses the fundamental opportunity. The industry doesn’t just need faster horses, it needs automobiles.

Cloud foundations are like inventing the steam engine; they enable entirely new possibilities rather than merely improving existing ones. What the industry desperately needs is a reimagined approach to early design that connects the disjointed steps from requirements to presentation, a unified workflow that connects people, their tools, and the data they need for the most decisive phase of building design. By focusing on where decisions have the greatest impact, the early design process, we’re addressing the industry’s most pressing challenges head-on.

The AI inflection point for AEC

The emergence of advanced AI capabilities represents both an opportunity and a challenge for our industry. There’s a saying circulating that “people who use AI will replace people who don’t.” While oversimplified, it captures an important truth: AI will fundamentally reshape AEC workflows, but only in connected ecosystems with structured data that can leverage its full potential.

While the cloud foundations are like the steam engine, AI is like electricity, transforming not just how we power our work, but fundamentally changing what’s possible in every aspect of the design and construction process. We as an industry are uniquely placed to see this transition happen simultaneously, unlike other industries where it was clearly sequential. We’re witnessing large firms investing heavily in proprietary AI systems built on their internal data. While commendable, this approach is ultimately unsustainable. Building reliable, maintainable AI systems requires expertise that, while possible for AEC firms to develop, distracts from their core competency of designing better buildings.

At Snaptrude, we’ve invested heavily in AI for practical, urgent industry problems. For example, our agent that helps firms create program requirements by analysing RFPs gives teams a solid foundation to begin their design process. Similarly, our investment in AI-powered rendering tools achieves state-of-the-art performance in adhering to geometry and design intent.

Real transformation requires new foundations

The future of BIM isn’t about incremental improvements to existing tools but a fundamental reimagining of how we design, build, and operate the built environment. By creating a platform that connects stakeholders, streamlines workflows, and harnesses the power of data and AI, we can address the industry’s most pressing challenges.

At Snaptrude, we’re proud to lead this transformation, particularly in the critical early stages of the design process. Our platform is already delivering measurable value to firms today, with customers attributing project profitability directly to our deployment. But we’re just getting started.

The AEC industry has the potential to be more efficient, more sustainable, and more creative than ever before. By rebuilding our tools with collaboration, data, and openness at their core, we can create a built environment that truly serves the needs of both today and tomorrow.

No more broken chains. No more silos. No more disconnects. Just better buildings created through truly informed decisions at every stage of the process, starting with the most critical early design phase. I’m so glad to see that we as an Industry are moving towards this future and it may not be that far away.