SAN RAMON, Calif., May 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Illoca, an AI-native design engine that returns creative agency to the architect, has closed $13 million in Seed financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from AIX Ventures, Root Ventures and Alt Ventures.
Architecture sits within a $12 trillion global construction industry, yet the tools used to design buildings remain fundamentally limited. Most design software cannot interpret architectural intent, forcing architects to spend the majority of their time producing documentation rather than developing ideas.
Architects spend 60 percent of their workweek not designing, but producing, translating, reformatting, and rebuilding work that already exists elsewhere. That adds up to more than 1,300 hours lost per architect, per year, or a $720 billion dollar “Production Tax.” When iteration is that costly, firms don’t iterate. They settle.
Founders Chin-Yi Cheng and Chiaowei Yu have spent more than a decade at the forefront of the industry. Chin-Yi pioneered generative AI for design through research at Google DeepMind and Autodesk AI Lab. Chiaowei led the BIM team at Tesla, delivering large-scale manufacturing and R&D facilities, and before that spent years on complex healthcare projects. Together, they saw how legacy tools stifled creativity rather than enabling it. Illoca is the intuitive interface they spent their careers wishing for.
Illoca’s first product, Illoca Tracing Paper™, replaces the traditional hundred-button toolset with a collaborative, intelligent canvas that mirrors the natural interactions of a design studio. Traditional software lacks any understanding of architectural intent, forcing architects to translate ideas through manual clicks. With Tracing Paper, they can now work directly through sketches, markups, and natural language, while AI agents understand those inputs and generate 2D and 3D designs in real time. By reducing time spent on manual modeling, Tracing Paper helps architects and stakeholders move fluidly between exploration and refinement, with more space to test ideas, respond to feedback, navigate tradeoffs, and focus on the decisions that bring projects to life.
Illoca turns weeks of design work into days. For early partners such as Kajima Corporation, one of the world’s largest design and construction firms, the shift is already redefining the project lifecycle. “Early-stage design exploration is where creativity matters most, but it’s also where traditional tools are the most limiting,” says Yasuhiro Nakano, Chief Architect at Kajima. “Illoca allows our team to iterate through multiple options with incredible speed while preserving the architectural intent behind every concept.”
“We don’t remove friction in the creative process by embedding agents into legacy tools,” says CEO Chin-Yi Cheng. “Our vision is to build a direct conduit for your intent and taste; an interface so seamless that architects can finally design freely without the sensation of using a tool. While you remain in total command of the vision, a multi-agent ecosystem handles the heavy lifting in silence. The result is a process where your professional judgment is unmediated, and your output is multiplied instantly.”
“Architecture represents one of the most important disciplines shaping our world, yet designers are still forced into rigid, time-consuming workflows by legacy software,” says Maha Malik, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Chin-Yi and Chiaowei are tackling this decades-old challenge with a rare combination of deep technical expertise and genuine empathy for how architects actually work. By bridging the gap between high-level intent and professional-grade execution, Illoca is building one of the most paradigm-shifting applications of AI in the built world.”
This is just the beginning of Illoca’s mission to unblock the world’s most important creative industry. Illoca is focused on setting a new standard for professional interfaces. Creation should feel natural: plant the idea, mark up the possibilities, and command the space.
About Illoca
Illoca is an AI-native design platform built to return creative agency to the architect. Through its Tracing Paper™ interface, architects generate and refine 2D and 3D design documentation directly from sketches, markups, and natural language without leaving the creative flow. Founded by Chin-Yi Cheng (CEO) and Chiaowei Yu (COO) and headquartered in San Ramon, California. Learn more at illoca.com.
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