With its stated aim of developing a next generation BIM tool to rival Revit, Motif’s initial offering was bound to be a small subset of what will be the finished product. In AEC Magazine, we have explained this many times before, but it’s worth saying again – the development of a Revit competitor is a marathon and all the firms that are out of stealth and involved in this endeavour (Qonic, Snaptrude, Arcol and Motif), will be offering products with limited capabilities before we get to detailed authoring of models.

Motif V1 is a cloud-based tool which aims to address a range of pain points in architectural engineering and construction workflows, particularly in the design presentation and review phases. From what we have seen of this initial offering, it’s clear that Motif has identified several features which you would typically find across a number of established applications – Miro, Revizto, Bluebeam, Speckle, Omniverse and many CDEs (Common Data Environments). This means that there’s no obvious single application that Motif really replaces, as it has a broad remit. Talking to CEO Amar Hanspal (read our interview), the closest application the company is looking to as a natural replacement for is Miro, which became popular during Covid for collaborative working. As it’s browser-based it works on desktop, laptop or tablet.

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Ideation assembly

The initial focus of the release is to enhance design review workflows by offering a more connected and 3D-enabled alternative to Miro. Users can collate 2D drawings, PDFs, SVGs and 3D models from a variety of different sources, to bring them into the Motif space for the creation of presentations, markup and collaboration.

The primary sweet spot is for collating project images and drawings into Concept presentations, using an ‘infinite canvas’ which can be shared with team members or clients in real time. Models can be imported from multiple sources and views snapshot, drawings from Revit added, material swatches for mood boards, images of analysis results, pretty much anything. These can be arranged collaboratively and simultaneously by multiple users and the software neatly assists in grid layout with some auto assistance. There’s also the ability to add comments for team members to see and react to.

Motif recognises that a data centric approach is essential in next generation tools. With this aim in mind, Motif borrows some ideas from Speckle, offering plugins for a variety of commonly-used design tools, such as Rhino and Revit. These plugins offer granular, bi-directional links to the cloud-based, collaborative Motif environment. One of the special capabilities is the live broadcasting of objects from Revit as they are placed, with Motif displaying the streamed model.

It’s possible to run Revit side by side with Motif, with Motif automatically synchronising views. As geometry is added to Revit it appears almost instantly in the Motif view. This is food for thought, as it makes live Revit design information available to collaborative teams. While this is Speckle-like there’s no need to set up a server or have high technical knowledge.

Motif facilitates granular sharing of information through “frames,” allowing users to select and share specific subsets of data with different stakeholders. The software translates data from native object models (e.g. Revit) into a ‘neutral internal object model’ (mesh and properties) which allows it to connect with different systems.
Buildings can be manipulated in 3D and there’s smart work plane generation. This might not be super useful right now, but we can imagine how it will play out once the BIM modelling tools get added in. For now, images can be applied to surfaces and freehand 3D markup and surface-based detection give the software an uncanny intuition for selecting surface planes and geometry when the mouse is near.

It’s possible to make markups to these ingested objects in Motif, and somewhat amazingly these comments can also be seen back in the Revit session. For now, though, there’s no clash detection or model entity editing available in Motif – its initial use is design review. Motif stores all the history at an object level, allowing users to go back in time to previous states of a project and see who changed what.

The product’s interface is wonderfully uncomplicated with only nine tools. The display feels very architectural, presenting ‘model in white’ with some grey shadowing.

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The data model

The underlying data model is important. Motif uses a ‘linked information model’ based on the idea that in AEC all data is distributed data. Instead of trying to centralise all the project information in a single system, which is what Autodesk Docs / Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) does, Motif aims to link data where it resides and assumes that no single system will have all the necessary information for a building. So instead of ingesting and holding all the data to be one version of the truth, somewhat trapping users in a file format, or cloud system, Motif will pull in data for display and reference reasons. In the future we guess it will be mixed with its own design information.
Motif is intended to be ‘pretty open’ according to the team, with plans to expose the API and SDK to allow users and developers access to extract and add their own data and object types.

At the moment the teams are developing plugins to connect Motif with various commonly-used BIM and CAD applications, including Grasshopper, Dynamo, SketchUp and AutoCAD, in addition to Rhino and Revit which are already supported.

Business model

At the early stage of most startups, having a sales force and actively selling an early version of an application is usually a low priority. Instead, many startups just seek early adopters for trial and feedback. Motif, while being in development for almost two years already has a small sales team and is actively selling the software for $25 a month per user. Hanspal says this is to ensure good discipline in software development, to provide scalability, performance, and responsiveness to customer feedback. The initial adoption is expected to come from companies looking to replace parts of their Miro workflow.

Conclusion

Motif fully intends to take on Autodesk Revit in the long term. CEO Hanspal realises this is a multi-year marathon, so while the team develops a modelling capability, it is utilising elements of its current technology to provide collaborative cloud-based solutions for a variety of pain points which they have identified as being under-serviced.

For now, the company aims to develop a cloud-based 3D interface for project information which will not necessarily replace existing BIM or drawing systems but will act as an aggregator and collaboration platform for those using a wide array of commonly used authoring tools. The software comes to market with an interesting array of capabilities, which may seem basic but provides some insight into what’s coming next – the bi-directional streaming between authoring tool and Motif, the deep understanding of Revit data, models and drawings, Revit synchronisation, connectivity to Rhino and smart interaction with model data all impress.

There may be some frustration with obvious capabilities that are currently omitted, such as simple clash detection between imported model geometry but we are sure this is coming as development progresses.

What Motif does, it does well. It’s hard to pigeonhole the functionality delivered when compared to any other specific genre of application currently on the market. Many will find it’s well worth having for the creative storyboarding alone, others may find collaborative design review the key capability. Those that can’t afford Omniverse might love the ability to have an application that can display all the coordinated geometry from multiple applications in the cloud for project teams to see and understand.

t’s important to remember that this is a work in progress and as the software develops its capabilities, it will expand into modelling and creating drawings. Its tight integration with Revit will be useful and reassuring
to those who want to mix and match BIM applications as the industry inevitably transitions to BIM 2.0.

Meanwhile, the Motif team continues to grow, adding in serious industry firepower. After hiring Jens Majdal Kaarsholm, the former director of design technology at BIG last year, the company has added Greg Demchak, who formerly ran the Digital Innovation Lab at Bentley Systems, as well as Tatjana Dzambazova formerly of IDEO. Demchak was an early recruit at Revit before Autodesk acquired it and Dzambazova was a long time Autodesk executive, deeply involved in strategy and development of AEC, reality capture and AI. It seems the old gang is getting back together.

Interview with Amar Hanspal, CEO, Motif

Martyn Day: For this first product, what was the rational in bringing out this subset of features. They seem quite disparate?

Amar Hanspal: What we are trying to do, over multiple years, is build out a system that you would call BIM, to provide everything you need to describe a building and create all the documents that are necessary to describe the building. There are four key elements, plus 1: modelling, documentation, data and collaboration. And then the plus one is scripting.

The data part is all about how it’s managed, stored, linked, represented and displayed for a customer, which is the user interaction model, around all of this. Scripting is just automation across all of these four things. And we have always thought about BIM that way.

We know people will react to the initial product because they see the user interface and think we are doing markup and sketching. But behind the scenes, these are just the two things that got ‘productised’ first, data handling and collaboration, while we build towards the other capabilities.

Our philosophy around data is, no matter how we store it, fundamentally, no system is going to have all of the data necessary for a building. So instead of trying, like ACC tries to centralise the information – and while you will always have some data in your system, I think the model we’re trying to bring to bear is a ‘link information model’, like the idea that you’re watching us bring with the plugins and the round tripping of the comments. We’re going to assume that data is going to stay where it is, and like the internet, we have to figure out a linking model, sharing model, to bring it together.

You can look at the app where it currently is, which features a couple of core concepts that we’re trying to bring to market – this distributed data idea, and then the second one is the user model on top of it, enabling sharing.

Martyn Day: You have been talking with leading AEC firms for two years. How will you go from this initial functionality to full BIM?

Amar Hanspal: We can’t wait ten years, like Onshape to Fusion to get all the capabilities in there. So what’s the sequencing of this? From sitting down and talking to customers, the design review process that they were implementing, we product we ran across the most was Miro. For design review many are using a Miro board. They would express frustration that it was just a painful, static, flat process. That’s where our ‘light bulbs’ went off. Miro is just collages and a bunch of information. Even when we become a full BIM editor, we’re still going to have to coexist with Tekla,  Rhino, Tekla, some MEP application. We actually have to get good at being part of this ecosystem and not demanding, demanding to be the source of truth for everything.

It gets us to the goal that we’re looking for, and we’re solving a user problem. So that’s how we came up with what we were going to do first, a Miro workflow mirror, and some companies are doing design interview using Adobe InDesign. Over time, we can become more capable of replacing some of the things that Bluebeam and Revizt

Martyn Day: With the initial release you have started selling the product, many start-ups put off developing sales to get early adoption?

Amar Hanspal: It’s good discipline. It’s like, eating your vegetables. When you ask people for money, you have to prove value. It’s good discipline for us to deliver something that’s useful to customers, and see them actually go through the process of making decision to spend money on it because they see how much it’s going to help or save them. That’s really obviously Martin, why we’re doing it. Just good discipline. Fundamentally, we want to make sure that we’re professional people developing software in a professional way, it forces us to be good about handing things like scalability, performance.

Read our extended interview with Motif CEO, Amar Hanspal

The post Motif V1: our first thoughts appeared first on AEC Magazine.

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.

The post Future BIM voices at NXT BLD / DEV appeared first on AEC Magazine.

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

For more than two decades, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has promised to revolutionise how we design, construct, and operate buildings. At its core, BIM integrates geometry, data, and documentation into a single, intelligent model-envisioned as a digital twin of the built environment. The goal was clear: streamline collaboration, enhance coordination, and unlock data-driven decision-making across the lifecycle of every building.

But ask today’s architects, engineers, or contractors, and many will say: BIM hasn’t evolved much beyond its early promise.

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Despite billions invested and years of adoption, the tools that power BIM remain anchored to outdated paradigms. Built for a PC- and LAN-centric world, most BIM workflows are still siloed, static, and sluggish. Collaboration is clunky. Interoperability is limited. And critical design decisions are often made using software that looks and feels like it hasn’t changed since the ‘90s.

Put simply: we’re trying to design 21st-century buildings with 20th-century tools.

It’s time for a reboot. Welcome to BIM 2.0—a new vision powered by platforms that are open, intelligent, and built for how teams actually work today.

From static to dynamic

BIM 1.0 delivered a meaningful leap: it united 3D geometry with metadata and documentation. But it was built on a foundation designed for an earlier era. Files had to be saved, exported, and shared manually. Collaboration was mostly asynchronous. Real-time feedback loops were rare. And too often, BIM software became glorified drafting tools—used more for generating drawing sets than driving design.

BIM 2.0 changes the equation. Built on modern, cloud-native infrastructure, platforms like Motif are replacing static file-based workflows with dynamic, distributed data models. Updates flow across applications and stakeholders in real time. Comments and markups stay connected to the source model. Simulations run in the background and return insights —eliminating the lags that kill iteration.

This shift isn’t just about speed. It’s about unlocking a smarter, more adaptive design process—where models don’t just represent decisions but help shape them.

From fragmented to collaborative

Ironically, one of the biggest failures of BIM 1.0 is how much it fractured collaboration. Teams cobbled together PDFs, whiteboarding tools, issue trackers, and disjointed 3D viewers. Design decisions were made in one app, recorded in another, and implemented in yet another—often without full context or continuity.
BIM 2.0 flips that script. Collaboration isn’t an add-on—it’s the starting point.

Motif centers its platform around a shared, infinite canvas where teams can sketch, annotate, present, and iterate together—on top of live models. Think Miro meets Revit, but with the intelligence of a connected design system underneath.

This unified workspace does more than streamline communication—it expands access. Clients, consultants, and extended stakeholders can participate from anywhere, with no downloads, steep learning curves, or risk of version drift. Everyone sees the same model, the same notes, the same design logic—in real time.

From manual to machine-learned

BIM 1.0 automated drafting. BIM 2.0 will automate design intelligence.
As machine learning enters the design stack, we’re moving beyond repetitive documentation toward systems that learn, suggest, and adapt. Imagine tools that:

• Propose design alternatives based on performance goals
• Validate compliance automatically
• Fill in documentation as you go
• Optimise layouts based on usage patterns, daylighting, or energy metrics

These aren’t sci-fi dreams—they’re becoming reality. Motif and its peers are laying the groundwork for systems where designers focus on high-level intent, and intelligent assistants handle the details. It’s not about replacing creativity—it’s about elevating it.

From rigid to open

The future of BIM can’t be built on closed formats and walled gardens. For too long, legacy vendors have controlled data flows and forced teams into rigid ecosystems. Interoperability has suffered. Innovation has stalled. And designers have paid the price in the form of rework, exports, and brittle integrations.

BIM 2.0 is rooted in openness. Motif is built on modern, API-first architecture that integrates with the tools firms already use—Revit, Rhino, AutoCAD, SketchUp, and beyond. Live links replace file exchanges. Data stays fluid, accessible, and usable across systems.

This openness is not just technical—it’s philosophical. It’s about giving teams choice, flexibility, and the freedom to build the workflows that work best for them.

Built for the next generation of designers

Ultimately, BIM 2.0 reflects a generational shift. Today’s architects and engineers expect tools that are collaborative, fast, and intuitive. They grew up using mobile apps, real-time multiplayer games, and intelligent productivity software. They don’t want to wait 30 minutes to open a model or export a PDF just to share feedback.
Motif embraces this shift. Its UI is clean, its workflows feel natural, and its early features—from 3D sketching to live-linked presentations—are designed for how designers actually think and work.

And this is just the beginning.

Led by veterans from Autodesk, Revit, Twitter, Vimeo and Onshape, the Motif team is building for the long term.
Just as AWS began with a single service and evolved into a foundational platform, Motif is starting with collaboration—and setting the stage for a full, intelligent BIM ecosystem.

Future releases will expand into predictive modelling, AI-assisted documentation, intelligent agents, and beyond—bringing us closer to the original promise of BIM.

The stakes are high

The built environment is responsible for nearly 40% of global energy use and a third of greenhouse gas emissions. If we want to design buildings that are more sustainable, resilient, and human-centered, we need tools that can meet the moment.

BIM 2.0 isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a creative, cultural, and ethical imperative.
By building open, intelligent, and collaborative platforms, we can empower the next generation of designers to build a world that works better—for people, for the planet, and for generations to come.
The tools are coming. The future is open. Let’s build it, together.

Read more opinions

The startups

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

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

Beyond Legacy Thinking
Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, Snaptrude

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: Motif appeared first on AEC Magazine.

The race to challenge Autodesk Revit with next-generation BIM tools has intensified with the launch of Motif, a startup that has just emerged out of stealth. Motif joins other startups including Arcol, Qonic, and Snaptrude, who are already on steady development paths to tackle collaborative BIM. However, like any newcomer competing with a well-established incumbent, it will take years to achieve full feature parity. This is even the case for Autodesk’s next generation cloud-based AEC technology, Forma.

What all these new tools can do quickly, is bring new ideas and capabilities into existing Revit (RVT) AEC workflows. This year, we’re beginning to see this happening across the developer community, a topic that will be discussed in great detail at our NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences on 11 and 12 June 2025 at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London.

Though a late entrant to the market, Motif stands out. It’s led by Amar Hanspal and Brian Mathews, two former Autodesk executives who played pivotal roles in shaping Autodesk’s product development portfolio.

Hanspal was Autodesk CPO and, for a while, joint CEO. Mathews was Autodesk VP platform engineering / Autodesk Labs and lead the industry’s charge into adopting reality capture. They know where the bodies are buried and have decades of experience in software ideation, running large teams and have immediate global networks with leading design IT directors. Their proven track record also makes it easier for them to raise capital and be taken as a serious contender from the get-go.

Further reading – Motif V1: our first thoughts

Motif

In late January, the company had its official launch alongside key VC investors. Motif secured $46 million in seed and Series A funding. The Series A round was led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, while the seed round was led by Redpoint Ventures. Pre-seed venture firm Baukunst also participated in both rounds. This makes Motif the second largest funded start-up in the ‘BIM’ space – the biggest being HighArc, a cloud-based expert system for US homebuilders, at $80 million.

While Motif has been in stealth for almost two years, operating under the name AmBr (we are guessing for Amar and Brian). Major global architecture firms have been involved in shaping the development of the software, even before any code was written, all under strict NDAs (Non-disclosure Agreements).

The firms working with Hanspal’s team deliver the most geometrically complex and large projects. The core idea is that by tackling the needs of signature architectural practices, the software should deliver more than enough capability for those who focus on more traditional, low risk designs.

There is considerable appetite to replace the existing industry standard software tools. This hunger has been expressed in multiple ‘Open Letters to Autodesk’, based on a wish for more capable BIM tools – a zeitgeist which Motif is looking to harness, as BIM eventually becomes a replacement market.

The challenge

Motif’s mission is to modernise the AEC software industry, which it sees as being dominated by ‘outdated 20th-century technology’. Motif aims to create a next-generation platform for building design, integrating 3D, cloud, and machine learning technologies. Challenges such as climate resilience, rapid urbanisation modelling, and working with globally distributed teams will be addressed, and the company’s solutions will integrate smart building technology.

Motif will fuse 3D, cloud, and AI with support for open data standards within a real-time collaborative platform, featuring deep automation. The unified database will be granular, enabling sharing at the element level. This, in many ways follows the developments of other BIM start-ups such as Snaptrude and Arcol, which pitch themselves as the ‘Figma’ for BIM. In fact, Hanspal was an early investor in Arcol, alongside Procore’s Tooey Courtemanche.

At the moment, there is no software for the public to see, just some hints of the possible interface on the company’s website. Access is request only. AEC Magazine is not privy to any product demonstrations, only what we have gleamed through conversations with Motif employees. The launch provided us with an exclusive interview with Hanspal to discuss the company, the technology and what the BIM industry needs.

A quantum of history

Before we dive into the interview, let’s have a quick look at how we got here. At Autodesk University 2016, while serving as Autodesk’s joint CEO, Hanspal introduced his bold vision for the future of BIM. Called Project Quantum, the aim was to create a new platform that would move BIM workflows to the cloud, providing a common data environment (CDE) for collaborative working.

Hanspal aimed to address problems which were endemic in the industry, arising from the federated nature of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) processes and how software, up to that point, doubled down on this problem by storing data in unconnected silos.

Instead of focusing on rewriting or regenerating Revit as a desktop application, the vision was to create a cloud-based environment to enable different professionals to work on the same project data, but with different views and tools, all connected through the Quantum platform.

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Quantum would feature connecting workspaces, breaking down the monolithic structure of typical AEC solutions. This would allow data and logic to be accessible anywhere on the network and available on demand, in the appropriate application for a given task. These workspaces were to be based on professional definitions, providing architects, structural engineers, MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) professionals, fabricators, and contractors with access to the specific tools they need.

Hanspal recognised that interoperability was a big problem, and any new solution needed to facilitate interoperability between different software systems, acting as a broker, moving data between different data silos. One of the key aspects of Quantum was that the data would be granular, so instead of sharing entire models, Quantum could transport just the components required. This would mean users receive only the information pertinent to their task, without the “noise” of unnecessary data.

Eight months later, the Autodesk board elected fellow joint CEO, Andrew Anagnost as Autodesk CEO and Hanspal left Autodesk. Meanwhile, the concept of Quantum lived on and development teams continued exploratory work under Jim Awe, Autodesk’s chief software architect.

Months turned into years and by 2019, Project Quantum had been rebranded Project Plasma, as the underlying technology was seen as a much broader company-wide effort to build a cloud-based data-centric approach to design data . Ultimately, Autodesk acquired Spacemaker in 2020 and assigned its team to develop the technology into Autodesk Forma, which launched in 2023—more than six years after Hanspal first introduced the Quantum concept.

However, Forma is still at the conceptual stage, with Revit continuing to be the desktop BIM workflow, with all its underlying issues.

In many respects, Hanspal predicted the future for next generation BIM in his 2016 Autodesk University address. Up until that point Autodesk had wrestled for years with cloud-based design tools, with its first test being Mechanical CAD (MCAD) software, Autodesk Fusion, which demoed in 2009 and shipped in 2013. Cloud-based design applications were a tad ahead of the web standards and infrastructure which have helped product like Figma make an impact.

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In conversation

On leaving Autodesk in 2017, after his 15+ year stint, Hanspal thought long and hard about what to do next. In various conversations over the years, he admitted that the most obvious software demand was for a new modern-coded BIM tool, as he had proposed in some detail with Quantum. However, Hanspal was mindful that it might be seen as sour grapes. Plus, developing a true Revit competitor came with a steep price tag—he estimated it would take over $200 million. Instead, Hanspal opted to start Bright Machines, a company which delivers the scalable automation of robot modules with control software which uses computer vision machine learning to manufacture small goods, like electronics.

After almost four years at Bright Machines, in 2021, Hanspal exited and returned to the AEC problem, which, in the meantime, had not made any progress. During COVID, AEC Magazine was talking with some very early start-ups, and pretty much all had been in contact with Hanspal for advice and/or stewardship.

Martyn Day: Your approach to the market isn’t a single-platform approach, like Revit?

Amar Hanspal: In contrast to the monolithic approach of applications like Revit, we aim to target specific issues and workflows. There will be common elements. With the cloud, you build a common back end, but the idea is that you solve specific problems along the way. You only need one user management system, one payment system, collaboration etc. There are some technology layers that are common. But the idea is about solving end-user problems like design review, modelling, editing, QA, QC.

This isn’t a secret! I talked about this in the Quantum thing seven years ago! I always say ideas are not unique. Execution is. When it comes down to it, can anybody else do this? Of course they can. Will they do this? Of course not!

Martyn Day: Data storage and flow is a core differential from BIM 2.0. Will your system use granular data, and how will you bypass limitations of browser-based applications. You talk about ‘open’, which is very in vogue. Does that mean that your core database is Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), or is there a proprietary database?

Amar Hanspal: There are three things we have to figure out. One how to run in a browser, where you have the limited memory, so you can’t just send everything. You’ve got to get really clever about how to figure out what [data] people receive – and there’s all sorts of modern ways of doing that.

Second is you have to be open from the get-go. However we store the data, anybody should be able to access it, from day one.

And then the third thing is, you can’t assume that you have all the data, so you have to be able to link to other sources and integrate where it makes sense. If it’s a Revit object, you should be able to handle it but if it’s not, you should be able to link to it.

You have to do some things for performance – it’s not proprietary, but you’re always doing something to speed up your user experience. The one path is, here’s your client, then you have to get data fast to them, and you have to do that in a very clever way, all while you’re encrypting and decrypting it. That’s just for user experience and performance, but from a customer perspective, anytime you want to interrogate the data send and request all the objects in the database – there is a very standard web API that you can use, and it’s always available.

Of course we’ll support IFC, just like we support RVT and all these formats. But that’s not connected, not our core data format. Our core data format is a lot looser, because we realised in this industry, it’s not just geometric objects you’re dealing with, you must deal with materials, and all sorts of data types. In some ways, you must try and make it more like the internet in a way. Brian [Mathews] would explain that the internet is this kind of weirdly structured yet linked data, all at the same time. And I think that’s what we are figuring out how to do well.

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Martyn Day: We have seen all sorts of applications now being developed for the web. Some are thick clients with a 20 GB download – basically a desktop application running in a web browser, utilising all the local compute, with the data on the cloud. Some are completely on the cloud with little resource requirement on the local machine. Autodesk did a lot of experimentation to try and work out the best balance. What are you doing?

Amar Hanspal:  It’s a bit of a moving edge right now. I would say that you want to begin first principles. You want to get the client as thin as possible so that if you can, you avoid the big download at all costs. That can be through trickery, it’s also where WebGPU and all these new things that are showing up are helping. You can start using browsers for more and more [things] every day that will help deliver applications. But I do think that there are situations in which the browser is going to get overwhelmed, in which case, you’re going to require people to add something. Like, when the objects get really large and very graphical, sometimes you can deliver a better user experience if you give somebody a thicker client.  I think that’s some way off for us to try and deal with, but our first principle is to just leverage the browser as much as possible and not require users to download something to use our application. I think it may become, ‘you hit this wall for this particular capability’, then you’ll need to add something local.

Martyn Day: You have folks that have worked on Revit in your team. Will this help your RVT ability form the get go?

Amar Hanspal: We’ve not reverse engineered the file format, but, you know, we do know how this works. We’re staying good citizens and will play nice. We’re not doing any hacks, we’re going to integrate very cleanly with whatever – Revit, Rhino, other things that people use – in a very clean way. We’re doing it in an intelligent way, to understand how these things are constructed.

Martyn Day: The big issue is that Revit is designed to predominantly model, in order to produce drawings. Many firms are fed up with documentation and modelling to produce low level of detail output. Are you looking to go beyond the BIM 1.0 paradigm?

Amar Hanspal: Yes, fabrication is very critical for modular construction. Fabrication is really one of the things that you have to ‘rethink’ in some way. It’s probably the most obvious other thing that you have to do. I also think that there are other experiences coming out, not that we are an AR/VR play, but you’re creating other sorts of experiences, and deliverables that people want like. We need to think through that more expansively.

Martyn Day: Are you using a solid modelling engine underneath, like Qonic?

Amar Hanspal: Yes, there is an answer to that, but what we’re coming out with first, won’t need all that complexity, but yeah, of course, we will do all that stuff over time.  There is a mixture of tech that we can use – off the shelf – like license one or use something that is relatively open source.

Martyn Day: Most firms who have entered this space, taking on Revit, is the software equivalent of scaling the North face of the Eiger – 20 years of development, multidiscipline, broadly adopted. All of the new tools initially look like SketchUp, as there’s so much to develop. Some have focused on one area, like conceptual, others have opted to develop all over the place to have broad, but shallow functionality. Are you coming to market focussing on a sweet spot?

Amar Hanspal:  One of the things we learned from speaking to customers is that [in] this whole concept modelling / Skema / TestFit world there are so many things that developers are doing. We’re going after a different problem set. In some ways, the first thing that we’re doing will feel much more like a companion, collaboration product, and it will look like a creation thing. I don’t want to take anything out of market that feels half incomplete. The lessons we’ve learned from everything is that even to do the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in modelling, we will be just one of sixteen things that people are using. I think, you know, I’d much rather go up to the North face and scale it.

Martyn Day: Many of the original letter writers were signature architects, complaining that they couldn’t model the geometry in Revit so used Rhino / Grasshopper then dropped the geometry into Revit. So, are you talking to the most demanding group of users to please?

Amar Hanspal:  I 100% agree with you. I think someone has to go up the North face of the Eiger. That’s my thing, it’s the hardest thing to do. It’s why we need this special team. It’s why we need this big capital. That’s why Brian and I decided to do it. I was thinking, who else is going to do it? Autodesk isn’t doing it! This Forma stuff isn’t really leading to the reinvention of Revit.

All these small developers that are showing up, are going to the East face. I give them credit. I’m not dissing them, but if they’re not going to scale the North face… I’m like, OK, this is hard, but we have got to go up the North face of the Eiger, and that’s what we’re going to do.

It’s like Onshape [cloud-based MCAD software] took ten years. Autodesk Fusion took ten years. And this might take us ten years to do it – I don’t think it will. So, what you will see from us – and maybe you might even criticise us for – is while we’re scaling, it’s going to look like little, tiny subsets coming out. But there’s no escaping the route we have to go.

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Martyn Day: From talking with other developers, it looks like it will take five years to be feature comparative. The problem is products come to the market and aren’t fleshed out, they get evaluated and dismissed because they look like SketchUp, not a Revit replacement and it’s hard to get the market’s attention again after that.

Amar Hanspal:  Yeah, I think it’s five years. And that’s why, deliberately, the first product that’s going to come out is not going to be the editor. It’s going to look a little bit more Revizto-like because I think that’s what gives us time to go do the big thing. If you’re gonna come for the King, you better not miss. We’ve got to get to that threshold where somebody looks at it and goes, ‘It doesn’t do 100% but it does 50% or 60%’ or I can do these projects on it and that’s where we are – it’s why we’re working [with] these big guys to keep us honest. When they tell us they can really use this, then we open it up to everybody else. Up until then, we’ll do this other thing that is not a concept modeller but will feel useful.

Martyn Day: How many people are in the team now?

Amar Hanspal:  We’re getting 35 plus. I think we’re getting close to 40. It’s mostly engineering people. Up until two weeks ago, it was 32 engineers and myself. Now I have one sales guy, one marketing, so we’ll have a little bit of go to market. But it’s mainly all product people. We are a distributed company, based around Boston, New York or the Bay Area – that’s our core.

We’re constructing the team with three basic capabilities. There’s classic geometry, folks – and these are the usual suspects. The place where we have newer talent is on the cloud side, both on trying to do 3D on the browser front end, and then on the back-end side, when we’re talking about the data structures. None of those people come from CAD companies, none of them, they are all Twitter, Uber or robotics companies – different universes to traditional CAD.

The third skill set that we’re developing is machine learning. Again, none of those guys are coming from Cloud or 3D companies. These are research-focused, coming from first principles, that kind of focus.

Martyn Day: By trying to rethink BIM and being heavily influenced by what came before, like Revit, is there a danger of being constrained by past concepts? Somone described Revit to me as 70s thinking in 80s programming. Obviously now computer science, processors, the cloud have all moved on. The same goes for business models. This weekend, I watched the CEO of Microsoft say SaaS was dead!

Amar Hanspal:  We know we’re living in a post subscription world. Post ‘named user’ world is the way I would describe it. The problem with subscription right now, is that it’s all named user, you’ve got to be onboard, and then this token model at Autodesk is if you use the product for 30 seconds, then you get charged for the whole day.

It’s still very tied to, sort of like a human being in front in a chair. That’s what makes the change. Now, what does that end up looking like? You know the prevalent model, there’s three that are getting a lot of interest: one is the Open AI ChatGPT model. It’s get a subscription, you get a bunch of tokens. You exceed them, you get more.

The other one, which I don’t think works in AEC, is outcome-based pricing, which works for callcentres. You close a call, you create seven bucks for the software. I don’t see that happening. What’s the equivalent in AEC time? Produce drawing, seven bucks? What is the equivalent of that? That just seems wrong. I think we’re going to end up in this somewhat hybrid tokenised / ChatGPT style model, but you know we have to figure that out. We have to account for people’s ability to flex up and down. They have work what comes in and out. Yeah, that’s the weakness of the subscription business model, is that customers are just stuck.

Martyn Day: Why didn’t Autodesk redevelop Revit in the 2010 to 2015?

Amar Hanspal:  What I remember of those days – it’s been a while – is I think there was a lot of focus on just trying to finish off Revit Structure and MEP. I think that was the one Revit idea, and then suites and subscriptions. There was so much focus on business models on that. But you’re right. I think looking back, that was the time we should have have redone Revit. I started to it with Quantum, but I didn’t last long enough to be able to do it!

Conclusion

One could argue that the decision by Autodesk not to rewrite Revit and minimise the development was a great move, profit-wise. For the last eight years, Revit sales haven’t slowed down and copies are still flying off the shelves. Revit is a mature product with millions of trained users and RVT is the lingua franca of the AEC world, as defined in many contracts. There is proof to the argument that software is sticky and there’s plenty of time with that sticky grip, for Autodesk to flesh out and build its Forma cloud strategy.

Autodesk has taken active interest in the start ups that have appeared, even letting Snaptrude exhibit at Autodesk University, while it assesses the threat and considers investing in or buying useful teams and tech. If there is one thing Autodesk has, it’s deep pockets and throughout its history has bought each subsequent replacement BIM technology – from Architectural Desktop (ADT) to Revit. Forma would have been the first in-house development, although I guess that’s partially come out of the SpaceMaker acquisition.

But this isn’t the whole story. With Revit, it’s not just that the software that is old, or the files are big, or that the Autodesk team has given up on delivering major new productivity benefits. From talking with firms there’s an almost allergic reaction to the business model, coupled with the threat of compliance audits, added to the perceived lack of product development. In the 35+ years of doing this, it’s still odd seeing Autodesk customers inviting in BIM start-ups to try and help the competitive products become match-fit in order to provide real productivity benefits – and this has been happening for two years.

With Hanspal now throwing his hat officially in the ring, it feels like something has changed, without anything changing. The BIM 2.0 movement now has more gravitas, adding momentum to the idea that cloud-based collaborative workflows are now inevitable.  This is not to take anything away from Arcol, Snaptrude and Qonic which are possibly years ahead of Motif, having already delivered products to market, with much more to come.

From our conversation with Hanspal, we have an indication of what Motif will be developing without any real physical proof of concept. We know it has substantial backing from major VCs and this all adds to the general assessment that Revit and BIM is ripe for the taking.

At this moment in the AEC space, trying to do a full-frontal assault of the Revit installed-base, is like climbing North Face of the Eiger – you better take a mighty big run up and have plenty of reserves. And, for a long time, it’s going to look like you are going nowhere. Here, Motif is playing its cards close to its chest, unlike the other start-ups which have been sharing in open development from very early on, dropping new capabilities weekly. While it is clear to assess the velocity with which Snaptrude, Arcol and Qonic deliver, I think it’s going to be hard to measure Motif’s modeller technology until it’s considerably along in the development phase. It’s a different approach. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong and with regular workshops and collaboration with the signature architects, there should be some comfort for investors that progress is being made. But, as Hanspal explained, it’s going to be a slow drip of capability.

While Autodesk may have been inquisitive about the new BIM start-ups, I suspect the ex-Autodesk talent in Motif, carrying out a similar Quantum plan, would be seen as a competitor that might do some damage if given space, time and resources. Motif is certainly well funded but with a US-based dev team, it will have a high cash burn rate.

By the same measurement, Snaptrude is way ahead, has a larger, purely Indian development team, with substantially lower costs and lower capital burn rate. Arcol has backing from Tooey Courtemanche (aka Mr. Procore) and Qonic is doing fast things with big datasets that just look like magic and have been totally self-funded. BIM 2.0 already has quality and depth. The challenge is to offer enough benefit, at the right price, to make customers want to switch, for which there is a minimal viable product.

It’s only February and we already know that this will be the year that BIM 2.0 gets real. All the key players and interested parties will all be at our NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences in London on 11-12 June 2025 – that’s Arcol, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Dassault Systèmes, Graphisoft, Snaptrude, Qonic and others. As these products are being developed, we need as many AEC firms onboard to helping guide their direction. We need to ensure the next generation of tools are what is needed, not what software programmers think we need, or limited to concepts which constrained workflows in the past. Welcome Motif to the melee for the hearts and minds of next generation users!

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