Five months after a beta launch in Tirana, before some of the world's leading architects, the Austrian-Albanian startup has 60,000 users, hundreds of paying customers, and Plug and Play on its cap table.
In November 2025, Synaps, a Vienna-based AI design startup founded by three Albanian-born entrepreneurs, chose an unusual venue for its beta launch: Tirana, the Albanian capital that has become one of Europe's most active and closely watched architectural scenes, and one of the few cities on the continent where a genuinely ambitious public building programme is still underway.
The audience included some of the world's most prominent architectural names and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, himself a trained painter with a track record of commissioning architecturally significant urban projects.
Five months later, Synaps is announcing a $3.6 million pre-seed funding round led by US-based accelerator and VC Plug and Play, with participation from Zagreb-based Fil Rouge Capital.
The company says it has reached 60,000 total users, 1,500 daily active users, and hundreds of paying customers, all while still in beta, before the first full version of the product has shipped.
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“We wanted to demonstrate actual numbers, traction, and credibility from relevant users,” CEO Brendon Ahmeti said.
“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.”
What Synaps is building?
Synaps describes itself as what would result if Figma and Lovable, the Swedish ‘vibe coding' platform that translates natural language prompts into working websites, had a child, and that child grew up to be an architect.
The analogy is deliberately chosen. Like Figma, Synaps is a browser-based, real-time collaborative canvas. Like Lovable, it uses a prompt bar to translate natural language descriptions into design outputs. The combination, applied to architectural drawing and rendering, is what the company calls ‘vibe designing.'
The core product is built around Vecy AI, a generative vector-based floorplan drawing tool that the company says it has trained on architects' behavioural patterns to reduce the number of commands required by 80%, accelerating the drawing process by a claimed factor of 50 compared to conventional tools.
The rendering engine, covering 2D, 3D, and video outputs, is claimed to be 100 to 1,000 times faster than current market solutions, depending on project complexity. These are company-stated figures based on internal testing and have not been independently audited.
The Autodesk comparison is direct and deliberate. Autodesk's AutoCAD holds approximately 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 of over $6 billion.
Revit, Autodesk's building information modelling platform, is the dominant tool in architectural BIM workflows. The critique Synaps levels at these incumbents, and which practitioners in the architecture sector have levelled for years, is that they were built for a pre-collaboration, pre-AI era: desktop-first, command-heavy, opaque to non-technical users, and structurally ill-suited to the collaborative, iterative, prompt-driven workflow that younger architects increasingly expect.
The company's pre-seed metrics are notable for a product still in beta. Synaps reached its 60,000 user figure in part through a social media strategy that generated more than 10 million views via YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn influencer campaigns with what the company describes as minimal investment, and had secured 10,000 pre-registrations before the beta launched.
The team grew from four to seventeen employees in the five months since beta launch, primarily in strategic roles. A San Francisco office has been opened following the time the founders spent in Silicon Valley in late 2025.
Industry reception has been strong, according to the company. Six of the world's ten most globally significant architectural offices have trialled or implemented Synaps, some daily, and 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.
What comes next?
The first full version of Synaps, Version 1, is planned for summer 2026, adding more than 20 new AI tools across drafting and post-production. The company is targeting 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. The San Francisco office will become fully operational as the US expansion accelerates.
The addressable market Synaps is targeting is not architectural firms alone. 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 to its own platform through Forma and other products, can move quickly enough to close the gap is the question every challenger in this space is betting against.