For almost twenty years the AEC software world was centred around Autodesk Revit and its definition and workflow of BIM. The concept was to ideate, model detail designs and create all the necessary drawings in one monolithic platform.

But software typically has a lifespan, where it needs to be rewritten or rearchitected (for OS changes, new hardware, and to clean-up years of bloat).

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Following open letters from customers concerned at the lack of Revit development Autodesk explained that it was not going to rewrite Revit for the desktop, but instead would develop a next generation AEC design environment on the cloud, branded Forma (N.B. Carl Christensen, the Autodesk VP in charge of delivering Forma, will be presenting at NXT BLD on June 11).

This gap between Revit and what will come next has presented an opportunity for new software developers to rethink BIM and its underlying technologies, to bring the AEC design software into the 21st Century. Investors have become equally excited and NXT BLD and NXT DEV will provide a unique forum for multiple startups—Snaptrude, Motif, Qonic and Arcol—to present new commercial BIM 2.0 products, with more firms in stealth, probably in the audience!

While the velocity of the startups is impressive, we need to temper expectations by pointing out that competing against established desktop BIM applications, which are 20+ years old, will take years (and millions of dollars). Over the coming years, expect to see these tools become more feature comparative.

While BIM 2.0 shifts the focus away from producing drawings, there’s no escaping their continued importance to the AEC industry. That’s why there’s also a big focus on autodrawings, as this AI-powered technology promises to massively reduce the time spent doing the mundane boring work. Autodrawings could also mean fewer licences of BIM software are required. Both Snaptrude and Qonic have developments here. However, it’s quite possible that autodrawings and AI will become cloud services that don’t need to be in an all encompassing BIM platform.

At NXT BLD / DEV you can meet and engage with all these firms, plus many more individuals innovating in the AEC space, such as Antonio González Viegas of ThatOpenCompany and Dalai Felinto of Blender bringing the benefits of impressive Open Source tools to our industry. We hope that you will join us.

NXT BLD 2025
London
11 June 2025
www.nxtbld.com

NXT DEV 2025
London
12 June 2025
www.nxtdev.build

Arcol

Based in New York, Arcol is headed up by Irishman, Paul O’Carroll, who brings a games development background to BIM and 3D. One of the earliest to profile its approach as ‘Figma for BIM’, the company has attracted investors such as chief executives of both Procore and Figma.

Arcol has focussed heavily on concept design for its initial offering, enabling live in-context modelling with building metrics and data extraction and collaboration built-in. The software supports complex geometry, an easy to learn UI, board creation for presentations (which can be shared by just sending a link), live plans and sheets. It integrates with Revit, SketchUp and Excel. Reports are highly visual and Arcol see it as a replacement for PDF as well. The solution is aimed at architects, developers, general contractors and owners. Arcol will be officially shipping by the time of NXT BLD.

Motif

Motif is headed up by former joint CEO of Autodesk, Amar Hanspal, who has assembled the old gang to finish off a task he started in 2016 – the rewriting of Revit as a cloud application.

Motif is also pitched as Figma for BIM and is backed by Alphabet (Google) with a sizeable war chest. In stealth for the last two years, the company has been working with signature architects to learn what a BIM 2.0 application should be able to do – the idea being that by catering to the most demanding customers, the software should benefit everyone.

The company has just launched its first version but recognises the journey will take many years. The feature set of version 1 lends itself to design review and client presentations, taking aim at Miro, but with some Speckle and Omniverse like capabilities.

Qonic 

The origins of Ghent-based Qonic go back to TriForma, a BIM system which co-founder Erik de Keyser created and licensed to Bentley Systems. de Keyser then created BricsCAD and Bricsys – a DWG and formative BIM tool, which was later sold to Hexagon.

Many of the Bricsys team then started up Qonic, a cloud-based BIM 2.0 competitor which initially (and uniquely) focuses on the model and data interface between architecture and construction. Qonic can load huge Revit models and lets users fly through them with butter smooth refresh rates on the desktop or mobile. The program also has powerful solid modelling core for geometry edits, as well as supporting IFC component labelling. The initial release is exceptionally easy to use to see, manipulate and filter BIM data, as a CDE on steroids. The team is working on architectural tools, smart drawings and a range of features to expand capabilities.

Snaptrude

Snaptrude has the accolade of being the first BIM 2.0 startup that AEC Magazine discovered. CEO Altaf Ganihar was first to demonstrate cloud-based collaborative working on Revit models and has gone on to raise $21m in VC funding.

The New York-based company seeks to be a one stop shop for conceptual, detailed design and drawing production, while linking to all the common tools – Revit, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Rhino, as well as Nemetschek’s Archicad. Snaptrude currently offers the widest range of BIM 2.0 features from concept to AI renderings and drawings and looks as if it will probably be first with feature parity to Revit for Architecture, with plans to also support MEP and structural. With the biggest development team in the BIM 2.0 space the company is moving at pace to deliver on its aims. The company is soon to announce a range of major new features.

Main image caption: Antonio González Viegas, CEO of That Open Company, the creator of free and open technology that helps AECO software firms and practitioners create their own AECO software, will be speaking at NXT DEV again this year.

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Beyond Buzzwords: the real future of BIM
Paul O’Carrol, CEO, Arcol

When thinking about the future of BIM, it’s easy to fall back on familiar buzzwords—AI, automation, cloud computing, data-driven insights. Don’t get me wrong; these aren’t just trendy phrases. They represent genuine opportunities to radically transform our industry. But honestly, they aren’t the starting point for me.

When I think about what BIM should become, I focus on one essential thing: collaboration.

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Rethinking collaboration from first principles

AEC might be the ultimate team sport. Every great project—from the homes we cherish to iconic global landmarks—isn’t the work of one person or even one discipline. It’s the outcome of many diverse, talented individuals working together, pooling expertise, and solving complex problems collectively. Ironically, despite our industry’s naturally collaborative nature, the tools we’ve been forced to rely on have historically pushed us into isolation.

Our current BIM tools are file-based, desktop-bound, and essentially built for single-user experiences. Even when they offer “collaboration,” it’s often superficial and awkward. True collaboration isn’t something you simply bolt onto a tool; it needs to be integral to every feature and interaction. Building genuinely collaborative design tools demands a fundamental rethinking, where real-time collaboration influences every decision, workflow, and user experience from the ground up. It also requires an extremely special technical team – we’re fortunate to be joined by lots of ex-Figma engineers (Figma is the company that pioneered real-time collaboration in a design tool).

There’s an essential distinction here: we must strive for collaboration rather than mere coordination. Coordination is reactive, aligning disparate efforts after they’ve been done. True collaboration, however, is proactive, continuous, and interactive, shaping the project together from the earliest stages through completion.

Unlocking the power of AI and automation

Once we have genuinely collaborative tools, we can fully leverage transformative technologies like AI and automation. Artificial intelligence holds immense promise—automating tedious tasks, optimising design decisions, and fuelling unprecedented creativity. Yet its true potential can only be realised when embedded within workflows designed for deep, continuous collaboration.

AI agentic workflows—intelligent systems autonomously handling tasks and streamlining processes—clearly represent the future of automation in our industry. Imagine AI agents independently managing routine tasks, predicting project bottlenecks, or even proposing innovative design solutions. But before we can effectively collaborate with these intelligent agents, we must first establish a foundation of seamless human collaboration.

Automation similarly offers enormous potential, especially in an industry burdened by repetitive tasks. Integrating automation into genuinely collaborative tools liberates designers, engineers, and construction professionals from mundane work, allowing them to focus on innovation and creativity. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about re-humanising the daily workflow.

Data-driven decisions through collaborative BIM

Data remains central to modern BIM, but without collaboration, it quickly becomes overwhelming and disconnected. Collaborative BIM tools democratise data, making it accessible and actionable for everyone involved.

Real-time, shared insights enable smarter decision-making, reduced risk, and improved sustainability outcomes.
Seamless data integration across design, construction, and manufacturing fundamentally changes the game, cutting waste and unlocking innovative possibilities we’ve yet to fully explore.

Arcol incorporates zoning, program, and costing data that is tightly synced to your model, and we’re constantly working to improve how all project stakeholders can interact with and access this data.

Arcol’s vision for a collaborative future

At Arcol, we’re actively creating this future. Our browser-first BIM solution represents a fundamental rethink of collaboration in design, removing the limitations of desktop-bound, file-centric software. By enabling real-time teamwork and seamless iteration, Arcol isn’t just improving workflows—it’s redefining what’s possible.

Ultimately, our vision for the future of BIM is profoundly human-centric. Technology is powerful, but it’s only meaningful when it amplifies human creativity, innovation, and collaboration. At Arcol, our mission is clear and ambitious: empower people, foster real innovation, and facilitate effortless collaboration across the entire project lifecycle.

The future of BIM isn’t defined merely by exciting technologies—it’s about connecting talented people, cultivating groundbreaking ideas, and building a better, more sustainable world together.

Read more opinions

The startups

Breaking the compromise in digital project delivery
Erik de Keyser, co-founder, Qonic

Beyond Legacy Thinking
Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, Snaptrude

BIM 2.0: why it’s time to reinvent the tools that power the built world
Amar Hanspal, CEO, Motif

The established players

Embracing AI and Boosting Sustainability Across Project Lifecycles
Daniel Csillag, CEO, Graphisoft

AI: Our Generation’s Paradigm Shift
Tom Kurke, VP, Ecosystems & Venture, Bentley Systems

The Future of BIM: Harnessing the Power of Data
Amy Bunszel, executive VP of AEC Solutions, Autodesk

Unlocking the Future of BIM with Interoperability
Mark Schwartz, SVP, Trimble

Design transformed: 2025 predictions from Vectorworks
Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CEO, Vectorworks

The post Rebuilding BIM: Arcol appeared first on AEC Magazine.

In recent years, venture capitalists have been reluctant to invest in desktop applications, believing that the future lies in cloud and subscription-based models. Adobe and Autodesk have paved the way with their own cloud-based offerings, but with Revit firmly on the desktop and no second generation in the works, a big opportunity stands wide open for the first company to create a truly powerful, collaborative cloud-based BIM tool.

Arcol plans to be that company and, along with Snaptrude, was one of the first to come out of stealth development. The company’s core principle is to rethink the way that design authoring applications work. By drawing inspiration from tools like Figma, a collaborative diagramming application, Arcol aims to create a centralised BIM system, in which multiple designers can work simultaneously on an architectural project.

Because it’s web-based and accessible through a browser, it eliminates the need for software installation on a desktop and supports real-time collaboration. The goal is to create a tool that contains the entire history of a project, allowing designers to easily track changes, comments, and sketches.

Revit replacements?

Some people get a tad over-excited when a product is pitched as a Revit replacement or a brand-new BIM tool. The tendency is then to ‘diss’ the current functionality of that product, dismissing it as being too limited.

But while BIM aspirations are indeed the long-term goal of companies such as Arcol, competing with today’s more mature solutions is going to take a number of years of hard development, not to mention a lot of cash.

As these applications develop, however, it’s likely they will start to offer features that are complementary to today’s BIM apps, such as real-time sharing and collaboration of data. Or, they may seemingly be much better, more akin to a BIM-like SketchUp. This is great, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s early days for developers at these companies, who are still looking for feedback, pointers and insight from users as to how what they’ve achieved so far could be improved, or applied to real-life use cases.

With that in mind, Arcol executives have made the decision to allow interested parties to sign up and get free access for one week. This will give prospective customers a chance to play with a limited feature set, experiment with geometry creation and get hands-on with some of Arcol’s rudimentary BIM capabilities (walls, doors, windows, and so on). They’ll also have the opportunity to get familiar with a sample UI.

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This one-week trial is offered in addition to the direct closed beta agreements that Arcol has made with some firms. The idea is to get rapid feedback from a broad cross-section of users, and perhaps in the process to whet their appetites for the product – all while being able to avoid exposing their application development to the masses (and critically, the competition). I suspect that the Arcol team will be running more one-week trials in future, when it has more to show.

Arcol is shaping up as a very cool conceptual design tool. In this early stage of development, it’s a kind of SketchUp-plus

But even in its current form, Arcol is shaping up as a very cool conceptual design tool. In this early stage of development, it’s a kind of SketchUp-plus. You start by creating a new project, using a simple in-browser interface, setting project location, units and so on. There are two tabs: one for Design and the other for Construct.

Design is a sketch tool, in which polylines can be used to define shapes. A closed shape can then be extruded, with opacity changes, boolean operations for complex shapes, and massing.

Construction offers walls, doors and windows, and the placement of other BIM elements, all of which are editable. The software supports a layers-based system.

As you model BIM components, a model tree builds in the menu for each component. If you want to collaborate, you simply share a project-specific URL with a colleague. They click on it, and suddenly they are in your session, enabling you to model and edit together. Creating walls is easy and placing components within them is fast and accurate. You can bring in 3D city data to give your model context. The quality of the graphics is good, with accurate architectural shading of the models.

The Boards concept lets the user create mood boards based on user-defined sheets, which can be a mixture of models, views, images and can be output to PDF.

A successful stage one Arcol has a solid vision for its Stage One. This covers the whole conceptual design phase, with a product that claims to be a mixture of Revit, SketchUp, Adobe Indesign, Bluebeam and Miro, all in one web-based collaborative package – and it’s impressively responsive for a 3D cloud application.

For me, some aspects of the UI are not perfectly intuitive (booleans, in particular), but I did manage to use 95% of the feature set without having to refer to the manual. Trying to select nested geometry in some of the demo models was sometimes frustrating, but this might have been down to my poor ability to manipulate the views.

Arcol is actually not that far off now from hitting its initial Stage One objective for massing and simple building design. It’s hard to estimate product velocity, because company executives are secret squirrels regarding the hitand-run preview, but I can see that the team is focused on delivering the basics well and in-depth, as opposed to going broad and thin.

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As software matures, and users gain expertise while file formats lock in legacy data, it gets very hard – even daunting – to consider switching to a competitive application. Practices must consider the cost of retraining, the possibility of being out of step in a collaborative world, and the loss of all that past investment. It’s not something to be taken lightly.

There are, of course, times when switching makes sense. You might feel the software you use lacks innovation with few additional productivity gains, or the costs go up and the past investment seems to have locked you into a dysfunctional relationship.

Historically speaking, the biggest driving force in customer migration comes when there are fundamental changes to the technology platforms on which software has been written. In the past this happened when business computing went from Unix to DOS and again in the change from DOS to Windows. If the software vendors are to be believed, the next platform is the cloud which could lead to another potential extinction level event for market leading software applications.

The BIM software market is an interesting segment to analyse. We have a market-dominating central player, Autodesk with Revit, together with Nemetschek’s Archicad, Allplan and Vectorworks, plus some geographic local winners such as Italy’s ACCA.

BIM first dominated the architectural design sphere and then slowly grew in structural and then Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing (MEP). The built environment market has always been slow to adopt, and the change from 2D drawings to 3D models still has some way to go.

If anything, many are using BIM as just another way to produce drawings, which are still the lingua franca and contractual basis for much of the industry.

Revit holds a very dominant position, with well over a million seats globally. While talking with frustrated architects who don’t understand why there aren’t more applications to choose from, the reality is that unless you are established and have an installed base, it’s very tough to enter what is essentially an oligopoly.

In discussions with venture capitalists and business angels who have considered developing a Revit competitor, they estimate the amount of money required being upwards of $20 million – some suggesting $100 million!

Part of this is because with market leading and established tools having had 20 years of development (OK, maybe 15!), a new tool from a start-up can only offer a fraction of the capability. Above the cost of development, the start-up would have to spend a fortune in marketing to convince existing customers to change horses. That is not a task to be taken lightly.

The reason there have been so few BIM start-ups is because the risk/reward is so high compared to venture capitalists funding yet another massing tool, or collaborative data environment application, which might get acquired by one of the big software firms.

Green shoots

Picking back up on the change of platform, venture capitalists now rarely invest in applications which are written for the desktop. If you have an idea for a software application that resides on a hard drive on a PC, you’re going to get little love from the money men.

They know the business model of the future is cloud and subscription and oddly, Autodesk is showing the way here. The thinking is, the first developer to properly produce a cloud-based BIM tool could well steal the lead on the incumbent desktop tools. Tie that in with well-publicised grievances of customers over lack of development and cost of ownership and there are a number of new players rising to the challenge.

New kid on the block

It’s unusual for us to write about a company with software not yet even in beta, but a new start-up called Arcol recently came to our attention, publicising a manifesto stating its development goals and aims, with respect to the grumblings permeating the industry.

The company is headed up by Paul O’Carroll, who comes from a games development background, and established Arcol to create a cloud-based building design and documentation tool which runs in a browser.

He recently moved to the United States and has managed to get $3.6 million in seed funding from some very interesting people, who know the AEC industry very well. One is Amar Hanspal (CEO of Brightmachines), formerly of Autodesk, where he ran all product development. The other is Procore’s CEO Tooey Courtemanche.

Hanspal knows Revit’s faults and has his own ideas as to what a modern BIM tool would look like, while Courtemanche is in a daily knife fight with Autodesk for the construction documentation and management layer with Procore vs Autodesk’s Construction Cloud.

Arcol also already has 7,000 firms signed up for a trial.

Arcol’s manifesto opens-up with a strong statement that is clearly fighting talk

Most design tools are from the late nineteen hundreds. We need to bring the magic back to design. We need something powerful, intuitive, and collaborative.

Think of how much technology has changed in the past two decades. Google docs. Slack. Zoom. The iPhone. While almost every product we touch has become web-based, collaborative, and consumer focused, for some reason, our design tools are still stuck in an ancient desktop paradigm of the 1990s.

We believe that 3D building design tools should be powerful, yet easy to use. Web-based, intuitive, and most importantly collaborative.

CAD went mainstream in the 80’s, and BIM came soon after, but since then it seems like tools have lost the magic. Over time they’ve gotten clunky, slow, unintuitive, and driven by greed — incumbents are public companies and therefore they’re [sic] only growth metric is profit.

O’Carroll then explains that he has been inspired to develop a BIM application from seeing new generations of tools like ‘figma’, a graphical application for collaborative diagramming. With this application, multiple users can work simultaneously on virtual whiteboards, designing interfaces, templates, or map out UI/UX design. By having a look at the figma website you’d get a clear idea at how this could potentially work in a collaborative BIM design environment. It would be a centralised system on which all designers simultaneously worked.

By starting afresh, O’Carroll believes that he can change the paradigm by rethinking the way design authoring applications should work. The first fundamental is web-based, browser-accessible, enabling centralised collaborative workflows, with no install.

Addressing collaboration, O’Carroll identifies Slack as a great example, “Slack allows you to have that information indexable, searchable, trackable and allows you to organise asynchronous communications independent of a singular closed silo. In a similar way we are building a tool to contain the entire history of a project — markups, comments, sketches… all the work that happens on the periphery while designing a building.”

Obviously Arcol will deliver 2D and 3D capabilities and, for this, O’Carroll takes inspiration from PTC Onshape, a mechanical CAD modelling tool, which competes against the mainly desktop-based world of Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, and Siemens Solid Edge etc.

Autodesk is also challenging with its cloud-based Fusion, but despite millions of dollars spent, the cloud-based apps have yet to make a dent in that industry’s 800lb gorilla – Solidworks, which is based on Windows and decimated the UNIX modelling tools in the 1990s. One could argue that if cloud was the next platform, then why hasn’t it taken off in the manufacturing space, where there are already two mature cloud-based systems?

The added complication is that, essentially, we’re talking about a replacement market, as opposed to virgin territory. As a start-up, your potential new customers have already invested in something, increasing their cost of moving.

Innovation

The one danger is producing a new product that just replicates the old. Being on the cloud does not make for a better product. O’Carroll identifies several areas where he’s looking for Arcol to differentiate itself from the competition.

One of the fundamental differences will be an infinite workplane, so users don’t need to flip-flop between interfaces and modes to create drawing sections and elevations.

“Sketching, drawing and editing should be as intuitive as possible. This is the lowest level form of interaction we have in CAD — yet these tools really haven’t been innovated upon much in the last 20 years.”, explains O’Carroll. “We believe that it shouldn’t take you an hour and a half to create a window component with a curved top. We had a thought: rather than having to edit a family in another window in some other editor, what if you could simply make changes to a sketch of the window to add the curve? In Arcol you can do just that.

“Every 3D component is built from an underlying 2D sketch. You can easily access the base sketch, make changes directly in the model, and then save your changes to have them cascade to the 3D representation.”

I can’t fault either O’Carroll’s enthusiasm or existing software inspirations. Even though we’ve seen no software product there’s plenty to chew on and project.

The problem with new modelling software for architecture, is they come out so limited in functionality early on, that they are always compared to SketchUp, or described as being ideal for conceptual modelling.

Mature incumbents benefit from having decades of feedback from professional users, enabling their software to handle many real-world edge cases – these are all the nuances that get added into commands to handle niche conditions to give flexibility. e.g. all the improvements to staircases, MEP routing, 2D representation, structural detailing, requests based on different standards etc.

Getting the fundamentals right is key, but getting the level of functional detail and sheer breadth of features is climbing the north face of the Eiger for any challenger.

In total, Arcol has $5 million to flesh this out, and now has two backers with plenty of industry experience and, to a certain extent, axes to grind.

Arcol will be in beta testing in 2022, with the first public release scheduled for later this year.

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