AEC Software
For decades, a small number of software platforms have defined how architects draw, model, document, and deliver buildings. Many remain indispensable today. Now, a new generation of companies is attempting something that happens remarkably rarely in architecture: building the next generation of professional design software. We are one of them.
We are setting out to understand the market we're entering: where today's tools came from, how long they took to build, who is challenging them now, and what their histories might tell us about what comes next.
What should we be asking ourselves?
We're asking some fundamental questions about where architecture software is headed. They're the same questions we hear from architects, advisors, and investors, and the ones we keep asking ourselves.
Who is building new software for architects?
When was the last new architecture platform adopted at scale?
How old are the tools architects rely on today?
How long does it take to build professional architecture software?
Who is attempting to build alternatives to AutoCAD and Revit?
How much capital is backing the new generation?
Are these startups actually building the same thing?
What would it take to build a new platform from first principles?
We are still beholden to software from a bygone era.
The first of the architecture software platforms we still rely on today began development nearly 50 years ago, in a radically different era of computing. AutoCAD, Archicad, and Vectorworks were conceived while the graphical user interface itself was still taking shape, long before the web, cloud computing, real-time collaboration, or AI. Menus, toolbars, palettes, modal dialogs, and dialogs within dialogs were reasonable ways to organize increasingly sophisticated software within the interaction models available at the time. These products succeeded profoundly, changing professional practice and creating workflows, expertise, file formats, and ecosystems that have endured for decades. But their success also carried many of those early assumptions forward. Much of the way architects interact with software today was established when computing itself looked very different.
Success at this scale creates its own gravity. Architecture firms don't simply purchase software; they build entire practices around it. Multi-year contracts, accumulated project files, custom standards, templates, libraries, plugins, training, and the expectations of clients and consultants make changing platforms enormously difficult. Your entire studio can become dependent on a piece of software long after you've stopped being happy with it. Moving to something new isn't merely a software decision. It is an organizational risk. That dependence creates extraordinary pricing power: AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT alone generated more than $1.5 billion in Autodesk's 2025 fiscal year. The result is a market in which customers may be deeply dissatisfied with the tools they use and still have little practical ability to leave them. When the cost of switching becomes greater than the pain of staying, incumbency becomes its own competitive advantage. To break that dependence, a new product cannot merely improve one part of the workflow. It has to give an entire studio enough reason to actually leave.
For the first time in decades, new platforms are emerging.
The dominance of today's platforms has not stopped a new generation of founders from building something better. After decades with remarkably few new entrants at the foundational level, a growing group of startups is rethinking the architect's working environment, from drawing and modeling to BIM, documentation, collaboration, automation, and AI. They do not all share the same thesis, and they are not all attempting to replace the same tools. Some are focused on particular parts of architectural practice, while others are building toward broader platforms. Taken together, they represent something significant: serious capital and talent are flowing back into the problem of how architects make buildings.
This is no longer a hypothetical market opportunity. More than $100 million has already been invested across this small group of startups, and several have spent years developing their products before reaching the market. But investment does not guarantee adoption. The harder question is what happens next. If a new tool helps an architect plan spaces, generate options, automate documentation, or create geometry, but the project ultimately returns to Revit for the difficult work of developing and delivering the building, the underlying environment has not changed. The architect has gained another capability, but also another subscription, another interface, another handoff, and another piece of software to manage.
Architects don't need another tool. They need a place to work.
The startups above are solving real problems. Space planning matters. Documentation matters. Automation matters. Collaboration matters. AI matters. But architecture is not a sequence of isolated tasks. Designing a building means moving continuously between drawing, modeling, materials, details, objects, data, schedules, documentation, visualization, coordination, and thousands of decisions that affect one another. A product can make one of those activities dramatically better and still leave the architect dependent on the same fragmented collection of software for everything that comes next.
Corvus is being built to replace that fragmentation with one coherent professional environment. We are not building a specialized tool that hands the architect back to another application when its particular job is done. Drawing, modeling, BIM, objects, data, documentation, collaboration, visualization, and AI are being designed as parts of the same system, so the work can continue without repeatedly exporting, translating, recreating, or changing mental contexts. The ambition is not to add Corvus to an architect's technology stack. It is to make that stack meaningfully smaller.
Architects are still going to architect.
Generation is not the same thing as creation. Midjourney did not eliminate the need for Photoshop, and ChatGPT did not eliminate the need for a place to write. AI can generate an image, a paragraph, a floor plan, or a model, but professionals still need somewhere to think, draw, model, revise, refine, detail, and ultimately own the work. Architects are still going to architect. Corvus is being built for that reality, with AI available wherever it is useful, rather than premised on the idea that architects should stop designing.
Join our waitlist.
You’ve already waited 49 years. What’s another two? AEC professionals have spent decades jumping through hoops and creating workarounds for convoluted software. No one dares to build something that will challenge the status quo. It's time for something fundamentally different and unapologetically human. Join the waitlist.
What's In It
Why Use It
Revit Alternative
AutoCAD Alternative
Archicad Alternative
Vectorworks Alternative