Snaptrude gets VC backing to disrupt Autodesk in building design space

Young company Snaptrude is seeking to unseat Autodesk in the architectural design market by offering consumers more advanced and comprehensive feature sets for less money. The New York City-based company's early success helped it attract thousands of clients and, most recently, seed capital. The business is employing a strategy similar to Figma to take on a sector that has relied on decades-old code and where cloud-based collaboration is still elusive, having acquired $6.6 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundamental VC. "The issue has been the industry's extremely archaic nature. Huge corporations like Autodesk, which developed software primarily in the 1990s, dominate the market. Therefore, the software stack is highly outdated, according to Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO of Snaptrude. The widely used Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions, including Autodesk's Revit, have significant shortcomings. They need high-end computers and lack interoperability. In multiple open letters to the $40 billion Autodesk, architects, engineers, construction companies, and industry associations have voiced these worries with little to no result. Also Read: Learn To Type Apple Logo On iPhone, iPad And Mac The giants are not being fought by Snaptrude alone. The same issue is being addressed by startups like Arcol, which we profiled in March of last year and which began operations in January 2021. According to Ganihar, Snaptrude is providing a complete solution to the market, in contrast to Arcol and other startups that would need a few years to release their goods. In a full-stack scenario, "there are scarcely any players," he told TechCrunch. After having a dreadful experience with legacy software while working on a national-level project to repair the UNESCO world heritage site Hampi in India's Karnataka, Ganihar, who has a background in computer graphics and computer vision research, got the idea to establish Snaptrude.