Stylib, a startup revolutionising how design professionals search, review and specify architectural products, has raised £1.5 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Foundamental, a global early-stage construction tech investor. The funding, which includes participation from AEC/O software provider Nemetschek Group and Redstone Built World Strategy, will be used to accelerate the company’s product development and UK operation.
Founded by two architects in 2021, Stylib is on a mission to help specifiers find, curate and manage architectural products from suppliers and manufacturers.
Currently, architectural product discovery is a time-consuming task. Designers spend days browsing through vast catalogues and are unable to cover the constantly-growing market offering when searching for products for their projects. While product suppliers and manufacturers remain focused on showrooms and catalogues to reach potential buyers, Stylib solves this problem by bringing hundreds of leading suppliers onto its digital platform, equipping designers with product discovery and design stack tools that make it easier than ever to find, review and include suppliers’ products in their specifications.
Stylib’s proprietary machine vision tools allow designers to use their own inspiration images to search for relevant products from trade suppliers. It is then coupled with the company’s vast product database, which helps specifiers to further narrow down their search using technical filters that include critical information like sustainability criteria, fire rating, slip resistance and more.
By doing so, the company saves designers dozens of working hours every month and allows them to explore a vast array of product alternatives without being limited to salespeople’s availability. To complement its search technology, the company is developing tools such as digital moodboards and personalised material libraries, that help designers to manage their architectural materials’ knowledge base.
Stylib was founded by Noam Naveh (CEO) and Fabio Galicia (CTO), two architects who met whilst studying for a Master’s degree at UCL in design computation. By combining their sector-specific experience with technological know-how, the two aim to bring efficiency and transparency to the vast architectural products market, which like many other sub-sectors of the construction industry, has hardly seen any digitisation.
“As architects, we understand the frustration felt by design professionals when embarking on a new material search and trying to find the right products for their projects,” said Naveh. “We’re facing a ‘classic’ data access problem: globalisation and the rise of digital have led to the markets being flooded with products, however, the tools used to search and manage these products remain the same as 20 years ago.
“Currently, both suppliers and designers remain dependent on catalogues, showrooms and salespeople. The result is inefficient product discovery for designers and ineffective pre-sales workflows for suppliers.
“Stylib is transforming this by creating tools that complement the work of design professionals in the digital world. We’re delighted to have the support of such an experienced group of investors who will help us to reshape our own industry.”
Patric Hellermann, general partner at Foundamental, said: “Having to rely on manual methods to find materials is holding back suppliers from connecting with designers and making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to track product details for environmental and safety purposes.
“This is an exciting opportunity for a digitally-native product and we believe Noam and Fabio have the drive and the team to do so.”
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