Naya Investment Rationale – York IE

On the earliest stage of a enterprise, one of the crucial essential issues founders have to possess is a deep understanding of their goal person and the challenges they face in performing their obligations.

For this reason the York IE workforce typically references founder-market slot in our funding rationales and different content material. We wish to spend money on founders who’ve intimate information of their customers, the issue they’re fixing for them and the market during which they’re enjoying. Saad Rajan and Vivek Hv, co-founders of York IE’s newest funding, Naya, are nice examples.

Saad, Vivek and the Naya workforce are constructing the working system for product design. Throughout our diligence we heard Naya described in a number of alternative ways, together with Uber for product design, Figma for {hardware} design and Asana for industrial design. Whereas all of these are catchy descriptions for an early-stage startup, they every solely describe a part of the founders’ imaginative and prescient. What actually attracted our workforce was listening to Saad and Vivek describe the challenges every persona within the product design course of faces and listening to the empathy they’d for these customers based mostly on their private experiences.

Saad and Vivek each started their careers working in design and finally met whereas getting their graduate levels on the Harvard GraduateSchool of Design. Saad, who serves as CEO, began his profession constructing high-rises in Canada earlier than changing into an earthquake engineer in Tajikistan whereas additionally co-founding Njaro, a Tanzanian-based startup connecting native artisans to technique of manufacturing. He additionally labored as a design guide and in challenge administration earlier than enrolling at Harvard.

Vivek, the CTO, is an aerospace engineer who started his profession designing and constructing jets for Honeywell. He has additionally constructed a healthcare startup in India and served as a analysis assistant and graduate instructing fellow at Harvard in design and information science.

Their mixed academic, entrepreneurial and design experiences make Saad and Vivek the proper founding workforce to execute on their imaginative and prescient. They lead a proficient workforce of product designers, architects, builders, UI/UX designers and information scientists — who’ve expertise at corporations together with Google, Figma, McKinsey and Firm, Dropbox, Fb and Puma — which can be well-suited to help them of their journey.

Right this moment the bodily product design course of is tedious. It is stuffed with guide steps, multi-tool hand-offs (typically together with e mail, PDFs, computer-aided design renderings, sketches and pictures) and lots of context switches that end in errors, pointless prices and delays and, in worst-case eventualities, product pullbacks. Naya is the primary to problem the established order course of, not solely tackling the inefficiencies that translate to hundreds of thousands of income loss and sudden challenge prices yearly, but in addition opening up the flexibility for under-designed populations to create for themselves.

Naya is a design collaboration platform simplifying the bodily object design course of with AI-assisted high quality and sustainability steerage, a built-in pricing estimator and a designer and fabricator matchmaking operate. By the Naya platform, ideators, designers and fabricators all over the world can meet one another extra simply and collaborate effectively to create higher, extra sustainable and extra revolutionary merchandise, quicker and with larger high quality, whereas discovering probably the most cost-efficient path to realization.

Naya is already working with main manufacturers equivalent to Herman Miller, Google, Wayfair, Adidas, Nike and Bose in a consulting trend. The corporate is utilizing these engagements to assist fund the early days of the enterprise and to construct a person suggestions loop to tell its product roadmap, and it plans to launch subscription pricing as soon as its funding spherical is closed and work to transform early clients to recurring income contracts.

Naya is initially focusing on corporations in furnishings, inside design, residence items and client electronics, trend, automotive and industrial equipment, with plans to develop to different industries together with medical units, {hardware} and footwear.

It’s fairly clear that the marketplace for serving to design and fabricate bodily merchandise is large. Saad and Vivek constructed a bottom-up market evaluation utilizing information from Autodesk, a software program firm offering instruments to the structure, engineering and development industries, they usually approximated that there are 60 million professionals worldwide utilizing or collaborating with customers of design software program. Based mostly on their proposed pricing mannequin, this results in a $117 billion market alternative. Saad and Vivek took their evaluation one step additional and decided which industries had been finest suited to the early incarnations of Naya and estimated that 29 million customers signify a $56 billion market alternative.

As beforehand acknowledged, Naya is the primary firm to tackle the suboptimal bodily product design course of. There are a variety of corporations that make up the present course of, nevertheless. These corporations embrace the Microsoft and Google productiveness suites, Autodesk, SketchUp, Fiverr, Dropbox, Figma, Asana, Miro, Canva and Procore. However most of these corporations won’t be instantly aggressive, and Naya’s workforce believes in an open platform, so each competitor or comparator is a partnership alternative. Naya’s actual differentiation comes from its imaginative and prescient of an end-to-end platform.

The corporate needs a buyer (firm or a person) to have the ability to go from concept to fabrication on the Naya platform, connecting with and pulling in exterior instruments when obligatory. Naya’s workforce believes this may allow the most straightforward and environment friendly course of, driving extra revolutionary, inclusive, sustainable and considerate product design for the world and communities that haven’t been designed for. It would additionally end in vital good points in productiveness and value discount.

York IE is worked up to accomplice with Saad, Vivek and the remainder of the Naya workforce. We imagine Naya is embarking on a groundbreaking endeavor that can really democratize bodily object design and result in vital good points in productiveness and effectivity throughout dozens of industries.