Hypar Inc., a design automation platform, has closed a $5.5 million series A funding round led by Brick & Mortar Ventures with participation from Building Ventures.
Culver City-based Hypar bills itself as a platform to help building-design and planning experts quickly create and execute their projects.
Its cloud-based technology is used in industries such as architecture, engineering, construction and real estate. With Hypar, clients can avoid the work of creating building designs from scratch by taking a generated plan and adapting it to fit their own project’s variables and requirements, such as the building’s electric and mechanical systems, number of floors and dimensions.
“By shifting a significant portion of design labor and analysis to automated collaborative systems, we believe Hypar increases the efficiency, consistency and quality of building projects,” Hypar co-founder and chief product officer Anthony Hauck said. “We want to see building professionals concentrating on difficult and unique challenges, not routine decisions.”
The platform’s space-planning app is called HyparSpace. Clients can use the web-based software to take the information they have, such as a building model or program spreadsheet, and apply 3D test fits of plans. Tools also include a sun path mechanism to see how the sun will hit a building throughout the day.
“Hypar provides the platform to deliver scalable building expertise to support the industry’s transition toward buildings as a product,” Hypar co-founder and Chief Executive Ian Keough said in a statement.
The company claims that, unlike other generative design systems, it can produce more detailed designs and create fully outfitted plans with essential elements such as the building’s electrical structure and even furniture.
Users can create designs with coding programming languages like C# and Grasshopper. The company said that no coding knowledge is required to use the platform, though Hauck said that use of coding could be advantageous with some of Hypar’s tools.
The company said its current enterprise clients each have between a dozen to a few hundred users on Hypar.Current clients include Playa Vista-based design firm Unispace and commercial construction companies such as Obayashi Corp., Goldbeck and Arco Murray. Its new funding will go towards expanding its platform features, product lines and go-to-market team.
“Hypar isn’t here to wholly replace other useful software packages, but rather to take on tasks that are currently laborious or badly suited to the assumptions implicit in those software packages,” Hauck said.
