Synaps raises $3.6M for AI-powered design canvas

Five months after launching its beta in an unconventional setting, an Austrian-Albanian startup has already amassed 60,000 users, hundreds of paying clients, and secured backing from a major global accelerator. The company is now announcing a $3.6 million pre-seed funding round.

In November 2025, Synaps, a Vienna-based AI design platform founded by three Albanian-born entrepreneurs, unveiled its beta in Tirana. The Albanian capital has become a hotspot for ambitious architecture, hosting one of Europe’s few remaining large-scale public building programs. The launch audience included top global architects and Prime Minister Edi Rama, a trained painter known for championing landmark urban projects.

Now, the startup has closed a $3.6 million pre-seed investment led by US-based accelerator and venture capital firm Plug and Play, with participation from Zagreb’s Fil Rouge Capital. Despite still being in beta and before shipping its first full version, Synaps reports 60,000 total users, 1,500 daily active users, and hundreds of paying customers.

“We wanted to demonstrate actual numbers, traction, and credibility from relevant users,” said CEO Brendon Ahmeti. “For us, it was important to state that we are here to stay, having built an AI-focused product to disrupt and democratize an entire industry.”

So what exactly is Synaps building? The company describes its product as the offspring of Figma and Lovable , the Swedish “vibe coding” platform that turns natural language into working websites , raised to become an architect. Like Figma, Synaps offers a browser-based, real-time collaborative canvas. Like Lovable, it uses a prompt bar to translate natural language into design outputs. The company calls this approach “vibe designing” for architectural drawing and rendering.

The core tool is Vecy AI, a generative vector-based floorplan drawing engine. Synaps claims it trained the AI on architects’ behavioral patterns to cut required commands by 80% and accelerate drawing by a factor of 50 compared to conventional tools. The rendering engine, which handles 2D, 3D, and video outputs, is said to be 100 to 1,000 times faster than current market solutions, depending on project complexity. These figures come from internal testing and have not been independently verified.

The comparison with Autodesk is intentional. Autodesk’s AutoCAD holds roughly 39% of the global CAD software market and generated $1.79 billion in revenue from its AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT families in its most recent fiscal year, within a total company revenue exceeding $6 billion. Revit, Autodesk’s building information modeling platform, dominates architectural BIM workflows. The criticism Synaps levels at these incumbents , one echoed by many in the architecture sector for years , is that they were built for a pre-collaboration, pre-AI era: desktop-first, command-heavy, opaque to non-technical users, and ill-suited to the collaborative, iterative, prompt-driven workflows younger architects now expect.

Synaps’ pre-seed metrics are notable for a beta-stage product. The company reached 60,000 users partly through a social media strategy that generated more than 10 million views via YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn influencer campaigns with minimal investment. It had also secured 10,000 pre-registrations before the beta launched. The team has grown from four to seventeen employees since the beta launch, primarily in strategic roles, and has opened a San Francisco office after the founders spent time in Silicon Valley in late 2025.

Industry reception has been strong. Six of the world’s ten most globally significant architectural offices have trialled or implemented Synaps, some on a daily basis. The platform has collected feedback from prominent architects, including Bjarke Ingels and Kengo Kuma.

Christopher Polligkeit, senior investment associate at Plug and Play Austria, framed the investment around two specific operational bottlenecks: rendering time and fragmented tooling. “Rendering alone can consume an enormous share of a studio’s time, time that could otherwise go toward taking on more projects and winning more pitches,” he said. “Synaps compresses that process dramatically. Equally important is the platform’s approach to collaboration: in an industry defined by fragmented tooling, an AI-native environment where the entire team works together in one place is a genuine step change.”

Julien Coustaury, managing partner at Fil Rouge Capital , the most active VC platform in the Adriatic and Balkan regions, with over 170 portfolio startups , said the firm was convinced by the team’s “clear product vision and deep understanding of architects’ workflows.” Plug and Play’s last major Austrian investment before this round was N26, the neobank, in 2013.

Looking ahead, the first full version of Synaps, Version 1, is planned for summer 2026. It will add more than 20 new AI tools across drafting and post-production. The company targets 150,000 users by September 2026 and 300,000 by year-end, a fivefold increase from its current base. A double-digit million seed round is projected for the end of 2026, and the San Francisco office will become fully operational as US expansion accelerates.

The addressable market Synaps is targeting extends beyond architectural firms. The company cites an estimated 200 million draftspeople worldwide who design approximately 95% of the world’s buildings and currently spend close to half their working time on drawing and rendering , the precise workflow Synaps is designed to compress. At that scale, even a small penetration of the professional market represents a very large revenue opportunity. Whether Autodesk, which has been adding AI features through Forma and other products, can move quickly enough to close the gap is the question every challenger in this space is betting against.