Hemanth V

My co-founder and I came to interior design and real estate as outsiders. We are engineers. We did not know the conventions, the workflows, or the way things have always been done.

What we noticed instead was something that practitioners had normalized: buyers are routinely asked to make major financial decisions based on a document they cannot read.

My co-founder and I are engineers. We built a product for an industry we had never worked in. What pulled us there was a problem we kept hearing described in almost exactly the same words by interior designers at every stage of their career.

'We lose pitches not because our design is worse. We lose because we cannot show it the way the big firms can.'

The big firms have render pipelines. They have dedicated visualization teams. They commission photorealistic 3D interiors as a standard pitch cost. The small studio is presenting a mood board and a portfolio PDF and hoping the client can imagine the gap.

My co-founder and I are engineers. We have never designed an interior in our lives. What we have done is spend a lot of time talking to people who do it every day, and listening to the same frustration repeated in different words.

The frustration: clients approve things and then do not recognize them when they are built. The mood board looked right. The space does not feel right. Somebody has to absorb the cost of fixing it.