London-based Stylib has closed a £1.5m pre-seed equity round in support of its digital product discovery platform for the architecture industry.
Founded in 2021 by two architects, Stylib was created out of their personal experience with the traditional process of product discovery in the industry.
“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 Noam Naveh, co-founder and CEO of Stylib.
“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.”
Naveh said that relying on catalogues, showrooms and salespeople results in inefficient product discovery for designers and ineffective pre-sales workflows for suppliers.
Stylib has built a digital product database accessible to clients. Using machine vision tools, designers can search for relevant tools and products from trade suppliers based on their own inspiration images.
The company claims it can save designers dozens of working hours a month by streamlining the product discovery process with AI.
Stylib is also developing other tools to make the search more intuitive, including digital mood boards and personalised material libraries.
According to Naveh, Stylib is the only platform of its kind currently. The CEO told UKTN the startup is “challenging traditional product aggregators like Archiproducts”.
The funding round was led by Foundamental, an early-stage construction tech investor. Other participants in the round included Nemetschek Group and Redstone Built World Strategy.
“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,” said Patric Hellermann, general partner at Foundamental.