Motif has the funding and motivation to unseat Autodesk as the AEC software champ. But it will require harnessing AI.
Autodesk has faced a number of challenges from AEC startups — and has swatted them all away. However, the most recent challenge, Motif, has raised $46 million in funding and, more importantly, is led by two highly motivated ex-Autodeskers, each of whom has a score to settle with their previous employer. Amar Hanspal, CEO of Motif, clawed his way up in 15+ years at Autodesk, from product manager to co-CEO, only to lose to Andrew Anagnost in a CEO runoff. Brian Mathews, Motif’s CTO, was a rising star in his own right, serving as VP of Autodesk’s Reality Capture team that Autodesk unceremoniously dumped. Mathews lasted two more years as VP of different Autodesk divisions before rejoining Hanspal, who, in 2018, resurfaced as CEO of Bright Machines.
Back to the Future
If there is any doubt that the pair is gunning for Autodesk, it is erased by Alex Bard, Managing Director of the VC firm Redpoint, the lead investor in Motif, who does everything but name Autodesk when the refers to Motif’s target as “the leader in this space that is 40 years old and has a $60 billion market cap.”
I saw Amar Hanspal for the first time when at then Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz’s side as she tried to defend AutoCAD’s ill-fated release 13 on stage at a SVAPU user meeting in San Jose. Hanspal went on to manage R14 and revive AutoCAD’s fortunes. Hanspal thrived at Autodesk. His deep product knowledge of Autodesk’s core product granted him the utmost respectability among rank-and-file Autodeskers, as well as high credibility with the CAD media. He took on positions of increasing responsibility, finally being appointed co-CEO after CEO Carl Bass was ousted — only to lose out to Andrew Anagnost in 2017.
Hanspal and Mathews left Bright Machines in late 2021. In its first two years, the company generated $30 million in revenue — almost unheard of a Silicon Valley startup.
It’s good to see Hanspal reunited with what may be his true passion: AEC. He’s an admitted fanboy of buildings, including SFO’s International Terminal and the Manhattan’s Freedom Tower. Motif is not Hanspal’s 1st rodeo. He cofounded RedSpark with Dominic Gallello in 1999 and joined Carl Bass at Buzzsaw in 2002. Both were Autodeskers. Both startups failed. Hanspal returned to Autodesk in 2007.
Revenge Motif
Hanspal expresses his frustration with the AEC industry having to use “20th-century tools to design 21st-century buildings.” It is a knock on Revit, no doubt, though Hanspal still thinks of Revit highly enough to bring along Matt Jezyk and Lira N. (Niolovska), VP of Product and VP of Design, respectively, both “early people at Revit.”
I first met Brian Mathews when he was head of Autodesk Labs. Mathews, with an engineering background (EE, master’s and bachelor’s from Cornell) yet still personable and approachable, stood out in a company that had become marketing first. Mathews went on to lead the Reality Capture group. But Autodesk lost interest in the nascent reality capture market and dumped the whole group, leaving most of us scratching our heads. Where did everybody go? Why would Autodesk abandon a market with tremendous potential in which it was sure to be a leader?
Revit: a Love/Hate Story
It’s too early to evaluate what Motif has to offer architects, as it won’t be releasing any products until the middle of the year. However, we can be sure to expect a cloud-based, database-based AEC design and build platform.
Revit is all too easy a target for a well-funded, well-led, AEC-knowledgeable startup. Revit is, after all, an old, desktop-based application that works only on PCs and stores data in a proprietary file format locally, all hallmarks of yesterday’s software. Modern applications, on the other hand, are cloud-based, store their data store in databases, not files, on the cloud, are device independent and available on subscription. Yet, Revit remains Autodesk’s BIM bread and butter.
Understandably, Hanspal would target Revit with all his rhetoric. However, Autodesk, no slouch in marketing, is able to present itself as a thoroughly modern software company and can easily dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous obsolescence, as cast by Motif, by promoting recent AEC applications developed and acquired. Someone wanting to know what Autodesk is all about has to dig through several layers on the company’s website to find Revit. On the surface, Autodesk shows next-gen AEC applications. At its last annual user event, AU, Autodesk led with Forma and ACC — as if the audience, most of them there to learn about AutoCAD, Revit and Inventor (their MCAD application), knew what ACC stood for [Autodesk Construction Cloud]. For Autodesk, ACC was clearly the company’s center of attention — as well as where development resources were devoted, much to the chagrin of Revit users. In fact, Revit users published an open letter to complain about Autodesk’s inattention to Revit. (Read the full story of the complaint and its aftermath in Martyn Day’s coverage in AEC Magazine.)
Getting Over Autodesk: What Does it Take?
Autodesk’s positioning itself as the creator of next-generation AEC software is credit to the company’s marketing and PR departments, both of which have no equal in the industry. To learn that Autodesk’s core AEC design product has a 30-year-old code base takes a bit of digging.
Still, even with genuinely next-generation software, will Motif be able to separate Autodesk from its flock? The millions of AutoCAD users stuck to AutoCAD even after a swarm of AutoCAD clones offered DWG compatibility at a fraction of the cost. BricsCAD, perhaps the most successful challenger, only managed an insignificant slice of the AEC pie, even though founder Erik de Keyser was a trained architect. (Undeterred, de Keyser is trying again with Qonic). Autodesk’s Revit declared itself the inventor of BIM even though Graphisoft’s Archicad was the first to pioneer BIM principles. Autodesk never suffered from SketchUp’s runaway success, even though the amazingly easy-to-use SketchUp had more users than AutoCAD.
Hey, AI. Give Them a Hand
How will Motif be received when it launches in June(?) will be interesting. I would suggest Motif use every available hour and resource to go full-tilt building AI-enhanced features. To go a step further, Motif should consider delaying the launch until it can position itself as totally AI-enabled — and for good reason: it is the lack of AI that makes established CAD companies most vulnerable.
I’m not suggesting Autodesk is standing still with AI; just that it is not moving fast enough. Autodesk’s Research division, led by Mike Haley, may have more papers published on AI than any other design software company, but the pace at which Autodesk is implementing really useful AI for architects (as opposed to what is easy for Autodesk to implement) has been maddeningly slow. The obvious comparison is to tech giant Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which led the tech industry in AI research but was content to roll it out at its leisure. Alphabet got a rude awakening when AI startup OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. ChatGPT was an overnight sensation and is now the perceived leader in AI.
We can argue how ChatGPT, a chat robot, a LLM (large language model), is useless for shapes, horrible at math, wrong too often to be of any use in design engineering, but that misses the point: ChatGPT was just the start of an AI revolution. It showed what neural networks can do. The design software industry needs to do with shapes what ChatGPT did with words. The modeling and behavior of physical shapes, be they products, machines, buildings, or their parts and components, could all benefit from AI.
Yet, CAD companies will not apply machine learning to the vast amount of design data at their disposal. Autodesk has ignored pleas to develop and implement slam-dunk AI solutions, such as automatic conversion of 2D views to 3D models. To this day, I cannot sketch a rough floor plan on a screen, have it made precise, much less made into 3D. I cannot take a photo of elevations of my home remodel drawn by a tech-phobic architect and have it automatically turn into an immersive fully rendered environment, either.
AI or Go Home
It is only with AI assistance that Motif could present a clear and dramatic distinction between itself and the established CAD vendors. With a weak implementation of AI, Motif can argue that it is modern until its last breath. We understand Motif will (probably) be database-based, cloud-based and local, with a single source of truth and device independence that lets users work anywhere. For each and all, Autodesk could counter with “Yeah, we got that,” citing examples from Autodesk Construction Cloud and a myriad of internally developed and acquired applications. But rolling out Motif with all the capabilities of next-generation software plus really smart and useful AI functionality would leave Autodesk speechless.
Should Motif take this advice, we have just the slogan for their mid-2025 rollout: “Motif — we’re motiv-AI-ded.”
You’re welcome, Amar.
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CORRECTED February 5, 2025: Hanspal left Autodesk to cofound RedSpark with Dominic Gallello then moved on to Buzzsaw with Carl Bass, not RedSpark with Carl Bass, as initially reported.
This article first appeared in its extended version on LinkedIn here.
