While Arcol, Illoca, Snaptrude and other browser-based design tools have publicly shown their development at every stage of this process, former Autodesk executives Amar Hanspal and Brian Matthews have taken a different approach with Motif, their $46 million startup that has pledged to shake up design tools since it debuted in 2025.
Motif’s newly launched design platform, Motif Design, is a browser-native, multi-threaded, cloud building information modeling platform that uses artificial intelligence not as a co-pilot or chatbot on the side of the design space, but instead has AI agents actively involved in the design that help with iteration, drawing, and even inserting finishes, products, and other 3D objects into the active space.
“I was the product manager for Revit when it was going from prototype to global scale,” says Tatjana Dzambazova, director of AI Solutions and previously leading the Revit team at Autodesk. “It’s been too long since the industry received a tool that respects as much as it is [design] The profession has changed and takes advantage of what this incredible, scary and wonderful technology has to offer [AI] it can finally allow architecture to regain its joy and not be a struggle.”
Motif Design’s browser-based 3D modeling tool runs on a cloud backend, with live floor plan and 3D views. It can create parametric walls, doors, furniture, and its interior design utility was a focus of the briefing ENR had with Dzambazova and Motif CTO Brian Mathews.
“Too much time is spent working around the limitations of the current generation of software instead of advancing the design itself,” Shane Burger, chief technology officer at Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), said in a statement. SOM tested the software and contributed to its development.
“I’m excited about Motif’s vision for a new generation of tools that merge AI and modeling in a collaborative environment, one where our teams spend their energy on design criteria rather than software workarounds, and deliver better buildings for our customers,” adds Burger.
What ENR saw was an inherent modeling capability that automatically writes model changes to sets of sheets and plans that are always with the user as they design. The workflow we saw spans several eras of CAD and BIM design and borrows from all of them.
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“If you think about the last major CAD tool, that was 30 years ago,” Mathews explains. “We didn’t have multi-threading. We didn’t have the cloud. You didn’t have GPUs or what they can do today. So if you just think about all the technology, you didn’t have AI. You didn’t have all these technological advances. This is really a new core approach to BIM.”
Mathews said the coordinated drawings and modeling are just the backdrop to what Motif wants to offer.
“There’s so much information on the Internet these days, whether it’s building codes, product specifications, what’s the weather and climate for a particular region? I mean, there’s a lot of information outside of CAD,” he says. “If you talk to people, that’s where they spend a lot of their time trying to get those answers.”
The software has a boundary rendering core (the engine of most CAD applications) and imported meshes can be entered for mathematical geometry without the need for forced conversion. Objects contain multiple representations, including representations such as door pivots in a set of planes. The details exist at the platform level while the model loading exists at the client and server level.
The Motif database can import information from other authoring tools. Original Revit or IFC schematics can be imported losslessly. While they still can’t export back to Revit, the workflow is there for businesses that still want to keep Revit. The platform borrows heavily from gaming technology, as its data models use composition rather than deep hierarchies. The agent is not outside the data model.
“Rhino will be here to stay. Revit will live for a long time,” says Dzambazo. “What was important to us is that we’re completely agnostic about what kind of models can come in, they can be from different engineers and different phases of a project.”
Dzambazo said it can read IFC schematics, but also allows users to edit and change the IFC class or IFC elements and update them back to both the model and Motif plans.
What Motif has created is a BIM application that can use its own AI agents to automate the construction of wall geometry, furniture, finishes and other community-use elements. An architecture firm’s Revit object library for hundreds of gigabytes of commonly used floors, ceilings, and walls could be rendered obsolete by a Motif AI that has acquired the skills to model them for each project in a simple natural language message to that architect still working on his design while brainstorming what the interior space might need.
“Wyou are no building one MCP activated superior of something we are no a complement we are building a of full rights BIM,”
Mathews said.
