Among the many next-gen CAD tools, Rayon stands out as the only one not targeting Revit. Instead, it’s squaring off against AutoCAD in the world of drawings. Recently, the company has been showing off some forthcoming AI tools that look pretty promising, writes Martyn Day
While other companies promised ‘Figma for BIM’, Rayon is delivering ‘Figma for 2D CAD’. This Paris-based start-up was founded in late 2021 by Bastien Dolla and Stanislas Chaillou and sits in the category of ‘lightweight but capable’ design tools. Rayon’s goal, meanwhile, is to modernise bread-and-butter 2D workflows.
To date, the company has raised almost €6 million in funding. Its €4 million seed round back in 2023 may have been relatively modest by AEC start-up standards, but its product has seen serious development velocity over the intervening period. It is argued by some that for many design professionals, day-to-day architectural and interiors work simply doesn’t require full-fat BIM or the overhead of legacy desktop CAD. This is where Rayon is said to fit.
Rayon’s product is a browser-native drafting and space-planning environment, designed for quick turnarounds and easy sharing, rather than for offering users encyclopaedic feature depth. That said, users can import DWG, DXF or PDF files, sketch out walls and zones, place objects, annotate and publish drawings.
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What distinguishes Rayon is its exceptional user interface, its huge library of content and the collaborative layer wrapped around it. Multiple users can work on the same model, libraries and styles are shared across teams, and stakeholders can view or comment without wrestling with installs, versions or licensing. It’s designed as a modern collaborative productivity tool, more agile than the self-contained, file-centric, desktop-based CAD system.
Rayon deliberately positions itself a few weight classes below rivals such as Autodesk’s AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT but is firmly focused on sharpening its AEC focus and relevant feature set. In time, it could become a contender.
AutoCAD remains the industry’s Swiss Army knife, customisable, scriptable and tightly wired into enterprise workflows. But the next generation might be tempted by fresher user interfaces. Rayon focuses on the sizeable cohort of architects, interior designers and space-planners whose work is largely 2D, who need clean drawings rather than a full modelling environment, and who value fast onboarding and frictionless sharing over specialist depth.
Where Rayon is stronger than the incumbents is in its immediacy. The barrier to entry is low, collaboration is native rather than bolted on, and it handles the everyday tasks that small and mid-size studios repeatedly perform. Whether that’s enough to shift entrenched AutoCAD habits is a separate question, but Rayon at least offers an alternative shaped around contemporary workflows, rather than decades-old assumptions about how drawings should be produced and exchanged.
AI ahead
The professional and educational background of Rayon co-founder Stanislas Chaillou leaves little doubt that AI will be an important part of the company’s future technology offering. The former architect and ex-employee of Autodesk previously attended Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), where he focused on the intersection of geometry, generative algorithms and design workflows. His book, Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice (www.tinyurl.com/AI-arch-book), provides a detailed timeline of AI developments from the technology’s early history to current architectural applications. Along the way, it exposes both the vast potential and the limitations of AI/ML in design.
Rayon’s other co-founder Bastien Dolla, meanwhile, takes an active role in defining how ML features get integrated into design workflows. The company has been signalling on LinkedIn and Instagram that it has some interesting AI features coming down the line and they do indeed look very cool.
Rayon’s AI boost will give it the capability to act as a workflow-embedded companion to architects and space planners, adding rendering and model-view automation together with asset generation.
It will also be able to handle natural language input. For example, a user might type in the following description: ‘Open plan office, 10m by 15m, glass partition, 1.2m high.’ The system will then produce a block or arrangement automatically. If robust, this kind of capability could lower the friction of asset reuse and speed up the otherwise tedious process of library searching, sizing and insertion. The software also has a cool AI capability of generating axonometric views automatically from 2D layouts.
Another point of focus is collaborative, multi-user editing, which will be baked into the AI layer. Rayon’s existing multiplayer canvas and library sharing will get a smarter overlay, with the software’s AI panel providing suggestions and auto-snapping design elements. It could perform version-history rewinds in response to semantic changes; for example, ‘You placed a room, convert to zone and annotate.’ This coherence across drafting, annotation and sharing looks amazing.
Rayon has also shown off visual-to-block/image-to-object conversion. This involves using an image or 360-degree capture to auto-extract walls, doors or furniture and turn them into native elements. For smaller practices working on refurbishments or adapting existing plans, this kind of feature represents a practical shortcut. It doesn’t compete with full BIM reality-capture workflows, but it rides comfortably in the gap between desktop CAD and immersive scan-to-model technologies.
From mundane to magic
Rayon’s planned AI features would seem to have much to offer: the reduction of mundane labour, a leaner drawing workflow, some extra magic sprinkles. The strategic bet that the company’s management is making is that if you can make 80% of drawing-related work faster and easier for small and medium-sized practices, there is a potentially huge niche to be conquered and one that the larger vendors tend to ignore.
The real issue here will be how well Rayon executes on its AI plans. How flexible will the text-to-block generation be? How well will it handle edge cases? Will the AI panel remain an optional helper, or will it become a locked-in workflow? All this remains to be seen, but if Rayon gets it right, this start-up may well shift the way that mid-market AEC firms think about CAD.
