American AI architecture design startup Illoca, founded by two Taiwanese founders, announced on May 6, 2026 that it has completed a $13 million seed round. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, and Alt Ventures. Illoca positions itself around an “AI-native design engine,” aiming to return creative control to architects and address a decades-long productivity black hole plaguing the industry.
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Architects lose thousands of hours every year—an industry-wide “productivity tax” of $720B
As an industry with an economic scale of $12 trillion, architecture design still has design software that has long failed to keep up with creative demands. Most mainstream tools cannot understand architects’ design intent, forcing professionals to spend large amounts of time on repetitive document generation, format conversions, and data reconstruction rather than on truly creative ideation.
Illoca’s analysis shows that up to 60% of architects’ work time each week is not spent on design, but on carrying out various production and translation tasks. Converted into annual figures, each architect loses more than 1,300 hours on average. Across the entire industry, this amounts to as much as $720B in hidden costs. Illoca calls this the “Production Tax.”
Embracing AI: two Taiwanese founders have spent more than a decade deep in R&D on the design front line
Both of Illoca’s co-founders have strong backgrounds across the two fields of technology and architecture. CEO Chin-Yi Cheng, a graduate of National Cheng Kung University (College of Architecture) and MIT, previously worked at Google DeepMind and the Autodesk AI Lab—pioneering researchers who applied generative AI to architectural design. COO Chiaowei Yu previously led Tesla’s BIM (Building Information Modeling) team, responsible for building large-scale manufacturing and R&D facilities.
For more than ten years, the two honed their skills in work environments where traditional tools suppressed creativity for the long term. They personally felt the limitations of existing software, and therefore decided to co-found Illoca—building the intelligent design interface they had long wanted in their professional careers, yet never had the chance to find.
Tracing Paper: from sketches to annotations—natural language can generate 2D and 3D designs
Illoca’s first product, “Illoca Tracing Paper,” replaces the complex toolbar of hundreds of buttons in traditional software with a collaborative intelligent canvas. The design philosophy is to simulate the most natural way of working in a design studio. Architects only need to input ideas through sketches, handwritten annotations, or natural language. Then, behind the scenes, AI agents can immediately understand design intent and automatically generate the corresponding 2D floor plans and 3D models, greatly compressing design workflows that previously took weeks down to within just a few days.
Kajima Corporation, one of the world’s largest design-and-construction groups, has become Illoca’s partner. Kajima’s chief architect, Yasuhiro Nakano, said that the early design exploration phase is when creativity is most crucial, yet traditional tools are most restrictive. Illoca enables teams to iterate through multiple方案 at astonishing speed while fully preserving the architectural intent behind each concept.
Bessemer bets on AI disrupting the architecture industry and setting a new interface standard
Maha Malik, vice president of Bessemer Venture Partners, which led the round, said architects are still constrained by rigid workflows in legacy software. He added that Illoca’s founding team is proactively tackling this long-standing industry problem with deep technical expertise and a sincere understanding of how architects actually work—one of the most paradigm-shifting applications of AI in the built environment domain.
When talking about the company’s vision, Chin-Yi Cheng emphasized that Illoca’s goal is not to forcibly plug AI agents into existing old tools, but to build a direct channel that reaches designers’ intent and taste:
Illoca is an interface that lets architects design freely, without the stiff, hard-to-operate feel of cumbersome tools. When architects firmly control the design vision, a multi-agent ecosystem quietly handles all the extra work in the background—so your professional judgment can be reflected instantly, and your output can double.
This round of funding will help Illoca continue expanding product features and establish a brand-new professional interface standard for the world’s most important creative industries.
This article, “AI architecture design startup Illoca raises $13 million—how do the Taiwanese founders return creativity to architects?” first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
