FORMAS.AI and the Reinvention of How Architects & Designers Work

For most of the past three decades, the daily working life of an architect or designer has looked roughly the same.

Sketch in one tool. Model in another. Render in a third. Move ideas into a presentation deck in a fourth. Stitch the workflow together with screenshots, exports, and a great deal of manual rework. Repeat for every project, on every iteration, for every client review.

The tools have improved. The workflow has not.

What's changed in 2025, and what makes this moment genuinely different, is that the underlying technology now exists to rebuild the workflow itself. Not to make rendering faster. Not to add a chat assistant in the sidebar. To rebuild the actual environment in which architects and designers think, draft, iterate, and ship.

FORMAS.AI, which announced a US$3.98M oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, is building exactly that.

The workflow problem, not the rendering problem

The first wave of AI in design did what first waves typically do: it accelerated the most visible, most painful step. Rendering. Type a prompt, get a photoreal image. Useful, but it solves the output problem, not the workflow problem.

The architect still has to ideate in one tool, sketch in another, render in a third, iterate by hand, and present in a fourth. The render is faster. The day is not.

This matters because architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is one of the largest under-digitised industries in the world. The software market is projected to reach US$13–15B by 2030. Yet the day-to-day reality for most architects, interior designers, and real estate teams is a stitched-together workflow across half a dozen tools, each with steep learning curves, none of which talk to each other natively.

That fragmentation is the actual opportunity, and it is not solved by a better render button.

Rebuilding the workspace, not the render engine

FORMAS.AI's bet is that the workspace itself needs to be rebuilt. Not the render engine. Not the sketching tool. The entire creative environment in which an architect or designer thinks, drafts, iterates, and ships.

What does that actually look like?

It means the canvas, the timeline, the asset library, the collaboration layer, and the AI models are designed together from day one. It means the architect's creative intent, the thing that's hardest to preserve when you string together generic tools, is held consistently across every step of the process. It means the platform orchestrates more than 60 specialist AI models behind a single intuitive interface, rather than asking the user to context-switch between point solutions.

This last point matters more than it might first appear. The dominant narrative in AI today is that one large general-purpose model will absorb every task. That may be true for horizontal use cases. In vertical workflows like design, the opposite tends to hold: depth wins. A platform that fine-tunes and orchestrates many specialist models, each excellent at a narrow task, will outperform a single monolithic model trying to do everything passably.

FORMAS.AI's "Studios" architecture reflects this. Different studios for sketching, rendering, image-to-video, iteration, and presentation. Each powered by the right specialist model for the job, all stitched together by a coherent creative environment.

The result is a workspace where AI behaves less like a feature and more like a creative collaborator. One that thinks in the same language as the architect or designer it is working alongside.

"The AEC industry is one of the largest and most underdigitised sectors in the world. The current design-tech stack has steep technical learning curves. We want to reimagine what a great design platform looks like when built AI-native, not bolted onto legacy tools, and the global demand we're seeing confirms that architects and designers are ready for that."

— Yiping Goh, Co-founder and CEO of FORMAS.AI

A team built to reinvent the workflow

Reinventing how an entire profession works is not a small undertaking. It requires founders who understand both sides of the problem: the software, and the user.

This is the first thing that stood out to Vertex Ventures SEA & India. The operator-practitioner pairing between the co-founders is rarer than it sounds.

Yiping Goh is a seasoned founder-operator, an exited entrepreneur, and a former Partner at McKinsey & Company. Someone who has built and scaled software businesses commercially. Professor Carlos Bañón is a globally recognised architect, Singapore President's Design Award laureate, and pioneer in architectural intelligence. Someone whose work is the user.

Most AEC tools are built by software people guessing at what architects and designers need. The most useful ones are built by practitioners who understand what software can do.

The second is organic demand validation. Since launching public beta in November 2025, FORMAS.AI has powered 500,000+ designs from users across 135 countries, entirely through inbound, with zero paid acquisition. This kind of organic pull is one of the most reliable early signals that a product has found a real workflow problem and solved it convincingly.

It also says something about the readiness of the market. Architects and designers are not waiting to be convinced. They are showing up.

"As AI evolves from fragmented point solutions to integrated platforms, FORMAS.AI is well-positioned in this emerging category, combining orchestration, fine-tuning, and proprietary tools to power design workflows at scale. We're excited to partner with the team on this journey."

— Jessica Koh, Senior Executive Director, Investment, Vertex Ventures SEA & India

What changes when the workspace changes

The reinvention of any profession's daily workflow is one of the most consequential things software can do. It compounds. An architect who can move from sketch to presentation inside a single environment does not just save hours. They iterate more, explore more directions, ship better work, and win more projects. The downstream effects ripple through firms, clients, and ultimately the built environment itself.

This is why AI-native design platforms are likely to become one of the defining vertical software categories of the next decade. The combination of a workflow that has been stuck for thirty years, a user base that is ready, and a technology layer that is finally capable of rebuilding the workspace from the ground up is rare. It does not happen often, and it does not stay open for long.

With this round, Vertex Ventures SEA & India is backing FORMAS.AI as one of the clearest and earliest expressions of what comes next. And it likely won't be the last conversation about how AI is reshaping the way real professions work.