"The promise of BIM—the 'I' in BIM— was always more talk than reality," Hanspal says."The internet has done a good job of making data that's much more fragmented—decentralized, but linked—able to be analyzed. How do we make that work [in AEC]? That is one of the most important things for us to do."

Hanspal, Motif's CEO, said the advent of generative AI is a catalyst to reimagine what is possible in AEC. While that excites him, Mathews says more important to him are the technical foundations required to bring the AEC industries into the 21st century. Code for design tools such as Revit, AutoCAD and ArchiCAD is similar to the Atari 2600, technology whose lifespan is being extended by building on top of old code despite the inherent limitations of age and the practice of building new on top of old. Hanspal said 2D CAD and 3D BIM must be completely reimagined to be cloud-native, collaboration-focused, computationally efficient, open by default and easily pluggable with other applications.

"We spent six, nine months chatting with a bunch of people we knew, construction owners, engineers," Hanspal says. "The one thing that struck us was them saying 'Hey, you remember what you used to talk about? It's still broken.' I think there's a level of frustration ... (with) the business practices associated with pricing and licensing. It was a combination of those two things that everybody's pointing at. I think the thing that convinced us to do something was we looked at the technology stack and thought we could do something significant."

The other founding team members include Matt Jezyk and Lira Nikolovska. Overall, members of the Motif team have held leadership roles at Autodesk, Tesla, Rivian and Phillips Design, among others. Also, after leaving Autodesk Mathews and Hanspal had held leadership roles in automation startup Bright Machines.

Hanspal says if Motif takes the time, it can build something that's more than CAD or BIM in a browser. 

"It's not like you have new kernels that are suddenly amazing [in CAD and BIM]," he says."There's a few ideas there that are interesting you can do when you're cloud native. Machine learning is showing up and separating hype from reality. That's the kind of stuff that we're wrapping our heads around, not just a nicer way of doing text and CAD."

Hanspal says Motif will deliver cloud-native, open data standards, real-time collaboration, instant responsiveness and deep automation, building off he and Mathews' experience at Bright Machines and Autodesk. Architects, engineers and contractors are looking to replace project data locked into file formats that make it difficult to share at a granular level. He also said what the company builds will be flexible and work with other tools.

"We may not generate or own every single deliverable that the industry needs," Hanspal says. "Energy analysis is a good example, but we need to be able to make it that it's easy for people to link to the same way people link to web pages." 

Other startups seeking to disrupt design software include Snaptrude and Arcol. CapitalG partner Jill Chase told TechCrunch that the history Hanspal and Mathews bring to the company was key to its investment. 

"You have to have some element of trust and relationships with big architecture firms for them to even let you in the door," and Hanspal and Mathews' combined 40 years experience in AEC software will help them take on the incumbents, Chase told TechCrunch.

Hanspal said Mathews, who is Motif's CTO, has wanted to tackle the federated data problem in AEC design software for some time. "We have to do geometry because of the deliverables, but the data is really key," he explains. 

Motif expects to introduce its first AEC products this year.