Singapore’s FORMAS.AI raises $3.98M in pre-seed round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India

FORMAS.AI, the Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) design platform, has raised $3.98 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round, led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India. The round also saw participation from UntroD Capital, Hustle Fund, Big Sky Capital, and Orvel Ventures, alongside angel investors including enterprise SaaS unicorn founder, Jeffrey Tiong, Co-founder of Patsnap; the founding team of Zopim (acquired by Zendesk); Antonio Rami, Co- founder of Kantox (acquired by BNP Paribas); and Bradley Tabone, Co-founder of Hammertech, a construction technology platform, FORMAS.AI said in a statement on Wednesday. The capital will be deployed towards team expansion, product development, and to scale go-to- market efforts globally, with the US and Europe as primary markets and Asia and Latin America as fast-emerging growth regions. Since its public beta launch in November 2025, FORMAS.AI users have generated over 500,000 designs across 135 countries, entirely through organic inbound demand. “The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is one of the largest and most underdigitized sectors in the world. The current design-tech stack has steep technical learning curves, “We want to reimagine what a great design platform looks like when built AI-native, not bolted onto legacy tools – and the global demand we’re seeing confirms that architects and designers are ready for that,” said Yiping Goh, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of FORMAS.AI. Professor Carlos Bañón, Co-founder, Chief Product & AI Officer of FORMAS.AI, added that for decades, architects have adapted their creativity to fit the constraints of their tools. “FORMAS.AI flips that relationship. We’re building the workspace where AI amplifies the designer’s intent – not one that replaces it with generic outputs,” he said. Jessica Koh, Senior Executive Director, Investment at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, commented that as AI evolves from fragmented point solutions to integrated platforms, FORMAS.AI is well-positioned in this emerging category – combining orchestration, fine-tuning, and proprietary tools to power design workflows at scale. It is noted that AEC has traditionally been slower to adopt new technology, but the latest advances in AI, particularly in spatial understanding, image generation, and multimodal reasoning, are creating new possibilities for how architects and designers work. Today, most creative workflows remain spread across multiple disconnected tools, and while AI has accelerated rendering, the opportunity to rethink how designers actually work remains largely untapped. The AEC software market is projected to reach $13 billion to $15 billion by 2030, as firms increasingly adopt AI-driven design automation across the project lifecycle. FORMAS.AI said the firm is designed for this moment – an AI-native workspace where architects and designers can sketch, render, iterate, and present within a single intuitive environment, working with AI as a creative collaborator rather than just a rendering engine. By orchestrating more than 60 specialist AI models within one unified platform, it said the firm preserves the designer’s creative intent at every step, delivering speed, accuracy, and consistency without sacrificing control. Nokia, Blaize, Datacomm Diangraha team up to deliver hybrid AI inference across Southeast Asia