Exclusive: Synaps secures $3.6M to develop an AI design platform.

      Five months after its beta launch in Tirana, the Austrian-Albanian startup has attracted 60,000 users, secured hundreds of paying customers, and has Plug and Play listed on its cap table.

      In November 2025, Synaps, an AI design startup based in Vienna and founded by three entrepreneurs of Albanian descent, held its beta launch in an unconventional location: Tirana, which has emerged as one of Europe’s most vibrant architectural hubs and is among the few cities in the region where an ambitious public building initiative is still in progress. The event featured an audience of renowned architects and included Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, a trained painter known for commissioning major urban architectural projects.

      Five months later, Synaps is announcing a pre-seed funding round of $3.6 million led by the US-based accelerator and VC Plug and Play, with contributions from Zagreb's Fil Rouge Capital.

      The startup reports achieving 60,000 total users, 1,500 daily active users, and hundreds of paying customers—all during the beta phase, prior to the release of the first complete version of its product. “We aimed to showcase real numbers, traction, and credibility from relevant users,” stated CEO Brendon Ahmeti. “It was vital for us to convey that we are committed to staying, having developed an AI-driven product to transform and democratize the industry.”

      What is Synaps creating?

      Synaps describes itself as a blend of Figma and Lovable, the Swedish platform that converts natural language prompts into live websites, suggesting that this combination has created a tool for architects. This analogy is intentional: like Figma, Synaps offers a browser-based, real-time collaborative workspace, and like Lovable, it translates natural language descriptions into design outputs through a prompt bar. The result, which the company terms ‘vibe designing,’ applies to architectural drawing and rendering.

      The key component of its offering is Vecy AI, a generative vector-based floor plan drawing tool that the company claims has been trained on the behaviors of architects to reduce the number of required commands by 80%, expediently increasing the drawing process by up to 50 times in comparison to traditional tools. The rendering engine purports to be 100 to 1,000 times faster than existing market solutions, contingent on project complexity—these numbers are based on internal testing and have not undergone independent verification.

      The comparison to Autodesk is explicit and intentional. Autodesk’s AutoCAD commands about 39% of the global CAD software market and generated $1.79 billion in revenue from its AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT products in its most recent fiscal year, amid total company earnings exceeding $6 billion. Revit, Autodesk’s building information modeling platform, dominates architectural BIM workflows. The critique from Synaps, as well as longstanding concerns from architecture industry professionals, is that these tools were created for a pre-collaboration, pre-AI era: desktop-centric, command-intensive, esoteric for non-technical users, and fundamentally unsuited for the collaborative, iterative, prompt-driven workflows that newer architects increasingly expect.

      Synaps’s pre-seed metrics are impressive for a beta product. The company gained its user base through a social media strategy that achieved over 10 million views through YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn influencer campaigns with what it describes as minimal investment, and secured 10,000 pre-registrations prior to the beta launch. The team expanded from four to seventeen employees in the five months following the beta launch, primarily in strategic positions. A San Francisco office was opened after the founders' time in Silicon Valley in late 2025.

      The company states that the industry response has been positive. Six of the ten most critically significant architectural firms globally have either trialed or adopted Synaps, some on a daily basis, and the platform has received feedback from notable architects, such as Bjarke Ingels and Kengo Kuma.

      Christopher Polligkeit, a senior investment associate at Plug and Play Austria, noted that the investment centers on two main operational bottlenecks: rendering time and fragmented tools. “Rendering can take up a massive portion of a studio’s time, which could otherwise be spent on acquiring more projects and winning pitches,” he remarked. “Synaps significantly compresses that process. Equally crucial is its collaborative approach: in an industry marked by fragmented tools, having an AI-native platform where the entire team collaborates in one space represents a real breakthrough.”

      Julien Coustaury, managing partner at Fil Rouge Capital, the most active VC in the Adriatic and Balkan areas with over 170 portfolio startups, expressed confidence in the team’s “clear product vision and profound understanding of architects’ workflows.” Plug and Play's last significant investment in Austria prior to this round was in N26, the neobank, back in 2013.

      What’s next?

      The official full version of Synaps, Version 1, is set for release in summer 202