Is it difficult to raise money? How long did it take? What milestones does my startup have to meet? What do investors have to understand about my company?
We interviewed founders that closed successful VC rounds at very early stages of their startups. Click below on each date to learn from them.
🇫🇷 Rayon, developers of a SAAS design tool for the architecture, engineering and construction industries, raised a $4.4 million seed round co-led by Northzone and Foundamental.
Here’s Bastien, one of Rayon’s co-founders:
What is Rayon’s elevator pitch?
- Building design is today an overly-fragmented process, with designers having to jump from one software to the other, and PDF export being the de facto medium for exchanges across the industry.
- In a similar way that Figma brought interface design tools to the browser and improved collaboration for web and product designers, Rayon hopes to achieve the same technological shift for architecture, engineering and construction industries (AEC).
What have you accomplished so far since your 2021 start?
- Build a first version of the product, a highly technical design tool built from the ground up with state-of-the-art technology: including a core engine, a geometry kernel, and a high performance vector graphics renderer, written in rust, compiled to webassembly, a real time multiplayer server backend, and much more.
- Recruited a team of 12 world-class professionals
- Launched open access to the product in June 2023, > 30k signups since then.
- Launched on content platform with more than 2,000 high quality block models available for free (all of them designed by Rayon)
What are your next milestones for your startup?
- Build the best design tool for architectural drawing (many amazing features to come: powerful version control, automatic floor plan creation from images thanks to AI, greatly enhanced performance, API access to enable others to build on top of Rayon etc.)
- Create a strong community around architecture drawings : sharing their knowledge and design via Rayon.
- Achieving a great acquisition > activation > retention > monetization funnel.
How long did the fundraising process take?
- Around one month, start to termsheets, but we had already created long term relationships with great investors.
From a scale 1 to 10 how difficult was it to raise the money?
- Hard question, I would say 3. We were lucky that it was not really hard, and we had the chance to be able to pick the investors we wanted.
What did the investors backing the round understand about Rayon and its market?
- The market for designing architecture is much vaster than just Architecture firms. A real time browser based tool enables new collaboration workflow and addresses a larger audience than designers. All stakeholders of the design – build – maintain process can become potential users.
- 2d drawings (CAD) are, and will remain, an essential part of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry. Currently, most innovation and investment are geared towards 3d. There is a huge potential in improving current tools used for 2d.
- Current incumbents were conceived several decades ago, before the internet, and users are waiting for a new paradigm.
- We have a team amazing enough to solve this problem!
What didn’t the investors who passed understand?
- You never really know! But I would guess it’s mainly due to the market:
– They did not understand the depth of the market.
– They felt that challenging the status quo will be very difficult as the AEC is viewed as a very conservative industry.
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