Software
Infurnia India is proving a furtive territory for new BIM development. In the March / April edition of this magazine we covered Snaptrude. Now we explore another BIM modeller taking aim at the Revits of the world, with a specialism in interior design. Martyn Day spoke with co-founder Lovepreet Mann
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n March we investigated two new that we can do more for this business. Interior Design and Kitchen Design variBIM modellers with new codebases, “When you’re doing interior design, ants. It’s impressively quick to model from fresh, young entrepreneurs you’re competing against AutoCAD and with and automatically allocates rooms / aiming to take on the establishment. SketchUp. In India, Revit is used in the spaces once the wall encloses a space. While it’s exciting to see new ideas as to larger projects. For buildings lower than The user adds doors, windows, colhow design and modelling could be done fifty storeys high, AutoCAD and umns, beams, slabs, roof elements etc. 2D in the 21st century, the software is cur- SketchUp occupy the market completely. / 3D is seamless and custom properties rently embryonic when compared to the The reasons Revit isn’t in our space are can be added. As it’s cloud-based, collabtools they are aiming to replace. twofold – it’s way too expensive for India, oration is built-in. There is also a sizable This month we have a new cloud-based and it’s also too complicated for smaller component library for kitchen and furcontender, Infurnia. While its aspirations projects. It has become too bloated. nishings, and you can create and store for the market are equally bold, Infurnia “Through research, one of the problem your own. All these catalogue items can has the additional benefit of already hav- areas that we found was interoperability. contain pricing information, so Bill of ing a cash positive income, being estab- You can’t really have Revit files and open Materials (BOMs) can be generated along lished as an interior design solution. them in other software. We want to build a with total cost of a design. Infurnia was co-founded in 2014 by software, where we don’t really have a file It’s possible to work in 2D or 3D and Lovepreet Mann and Nikhil Kumar. format. We wanted to build something save particular views (these appear as Neither studied architecture; they are in like Google Docs was in 2000 when com- tabs on the bottom of the screen). fact electronics/electrical engineers and pared to the Microsoft world at that stage - Clicking on them takes you to the views originally started developing limited feature set, cloud native, no form you want (plan 2D, angled 3D, whatever). Augmented Reality (AR) applications to file format of their own, but truly collabor- Any edits are reflected in all views. simulate furniture layouts in the home. ative. So that’s what we started. Dimensioning is incredibly easy, being After conversations highly automated and with furniture manufacdynamic, with changes to turers, the pair realised the model. Options range that there was a gap in You can’t really have Revit files and open them in from radial, angular, XY, other software. We want to build a software, the market for interior aligned and can be cusdesign software, as there tomised (fonts, colour, where we don’t really have a file format was nothing out there line type etc.). Lovepreet Mann, Infurnia co-founder that was built on modern Rendering is built in computing technology. To and by current standards date they have raised $1.5 is a bit limited. Infurnia million in funding from investors and are “Revit has RVT, SketchUp has SKP. will either render the view in medium for in the process of going for an Initial Infurnia doesn’t have a file format for it, no cost (480 pixels), high (720 pixels) for Public Offering (IPO). we support downloads to some open for- $0.10, presentation quality (1080) for “We started building very simple tools mats, right, but we don’t have any propri- $0.20 or 4K for $1.00 an image. You can to create walls and buildings, so that you etary format, per se. All of our data is also select the view as it is, a 360 panoracould do interior design,” explains Mann, accessible via open APIs.” ma or render a ‘VR view’ (stereoscopic). “That was [the] only architectural element Management and catalogues in our app, but while doing this we kept In use on researching, and there was something Infurnia is a cloud-based app, and runs Mann explained some more of the core nagging us in the back of the head saying in a browser. It comes in Architectural, concepts of Infurnia, “We have two dif-
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