Architectural software developers Rayon have launched a new design tool to “enable seamless collaboration across AEC industries.” The software, which shares its company’s name and is backed by funders including Norman Foster, is a browser-based tool that allows teams to collaborate on 2D floor plans in real-time.

Video credit: Rayon

Launching out of beta today, the Rayon tool was created to “end the dominance of legacy software in AEC.” While noting that such tools were groundbreaking when launched, the company argues that the high-performance specifications and licensing costs required for their use present a barrier to collaboration. “As a result, only using PDFs to share files makes it hard for professionals to transmit and share data, while the industry remains captive due to proprietary file formats,” the company explains.

As a result, Rayon supports filetypes such as images, PDFs, DWGs, and DWFs, and includes drawing, annotation, layout, and styling features to support the evolution of plan drawings. The tool also includes one-click link sharing to allow multiple users to incorporate revisions and feedback.

“Rayon wants to serve the 90% of practitioners that the status quo of legacy software does not address,” said Rayon’s co-founder Stanislas Chaillou, who recently contributed a feature article to our Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series. “For small to midsize projects, BIM and CAD software offers an incomplete answer. In comparison, Rayon provides a 'light-BIM' solution, blending features of both CAD and BIM worlds together, while adding a whole new layer of features, well beyond what legacy players can offer today.”

Video credit: Rayon

“We believe Rayon hits a sweet spot for practitioners, for whom this in-between category had been missing for too long,” Chaillou added. “Rayon is a truly web-first application with real-time collaboration and in-browser design experience, and we will soon be adding AI, a community platform, and more so we can offer an even richer experience to our users.”

News of Rayon comes weeks after Stability AI launched a free sketch-to-image tool named Stable Doodle. Earlier this year, Israeli startup SWAPP raised $11.5 million for a tool that offers “AI-powered construction documents in minutes,” while Autodesk unveiled Forma, an AI-driven tool for generating and analyzing BIM models.