Rayon V3

We shipped V3 today.
The effortless CAD our industry has been waiting for.

For decades, teams have relied on legacy CAD tools to design and deliver projects. Yet when it came to capturing the full scope of their work, no single tool ever truly fit. Overloaded interfaces, clumsy workflows, endless plugins, back-and-forths between complementary solutions became the norm.

The problem was obvious: drafting, styling, specifying, and sharing—while still pushing creative boundaries—was simply too much for this generation of software. Worse, their complexity, and the tangled workflows built around them, buried the act of designing under loading bars, busy screens, and countless clicks. More tools. More buttons. Less creative energy.

Rayon was built on a different belief: there is a better way. An effortless way. For four years, we’ve worked to bring you a unified, simplified, and elevated design experience—one that gathers every step of the process in a single tool, presents only the features you need in a clear interface, and boosts your workflow with a set of thoughtful, opinionated innovations.

With V3, we raise the bar once again. Different yet familiar—that’s the guiding principle behind this release. It positions Rayon at the crossroads of two worlds: the power of modern SaaS and the trusted foundations of design-centric CAD. With new AI tools, a redesigned scheduling panel, a refined presentation mode, and a deeper, more fluid drawing experience, V3 makes the act of building more intuitive, more approachable, and simply more enjoyable.

Let’s dive in.

Something different

Software are deeply entrenched in our industry. They are firmly rooted in the culture. That’s why we know that asking anyone to switch to a new tool set is a big ask. Early on, we understood that rebuilding a CAD in the browser was not enough, we had to offer something more, something different to convince experts. And Rayon’s initial intuition was clear: being a place for real-time collaboration, a one-stop shop (draft/stylize/layout all in one place), offering endless libraries have been our initial recipe to convince people to choose us. Thanks to this, tons of you already felt Rayon was a great solution; imagine: this year alone, more than 230k new drawings have been created!! With V3, we go much further. We introduce a brand-new feature set that we know will complete that “something different”; namely, AI, data & tables, and presentations.

Artificial Intelligence

Let us start from an evidence: AI today provides designers across all industries with the means to create like never before. If the built world still lags a bit behind, we believe that it also deserves to harness the full potential of this new technology. Interior designers, architects, space planners, etc should get access to AI workflows that are tailored and relevant to their job. That is why we have been working on weaving AI with the CAD experience over the past few months; a collective work that is finally being released today.

So what is Rayon AI? Simple: an all-in-one experience for interior designers, architects, space planners, etc. accessible from a single, unified AI panel, able to achieve 3 main things (for now)…

Educate — Rayon AI acts as a companion. It helps you navigate the software, refine your workflow, and elevate the quality of your work. It distills best practices, tips, and techniques—so you design with more confidence and clarity.
Generate — Rayon AI can also “make” things. It generates visuals, edits images, traces vector files, and even builds CAD blocks from simple product photos. Most importantly, it respects the iterative nature of design. Every output can be a final asset or the first draft of your next improvement.
Search — Rayon AI includes a reasoning-driven search agent that helps you explore our libraries—styles, blocks, templates—and return results that are far more relevant than standard keyword search. It elevates the act of searching to the level of dialogue with an agent, to ultimately bring you much ore relevant matches.

What to do with it? Countless things, just take a look at our documentation. However, among the many possible scenarios, let us give you a few ideas.

Get help to set up your drawing — Ask Rayon AI how to prepare your file. In a few lines, it will outline best practices, show you where to find key tools, and point you to relevant tutorials. Getting help in CAD has never been this easy.
Add styling to a drawing — Take any plan, block, visual or scene and apply a given aesthetic to it. Turning a simple CAD, wireframe-like drawing to the look and feel of a render, or a hand sketch is incredibly satisfying.
Change representation (axon, perspective, etc.) — Consider any document you have, and ask for a different view point. A plan can be turned into an axonometric view, a side view of a product can be converted into a top view, etc.
Generate CAD blocks from a product — Generate a CAD block, in all views (side, front, top), from a basic product visual. Simply submit a product picture to Rayon AI’s generate product tool, and you will get a set of CAD blocks covering various vantage points.
Trace an elevation — Take an image of a product, a scene, etc. and ask for a vector drawing of it. Rayon AI will produce for you a vector representation of it.
Find blocks for a given program — Don’t limit your search to a single type of items, go wide. With Rayon’s agentic search, our AI panel lets you ask for broad search queries: ask for bedroom furnishing, items useful in a hospital context, templates of housing projects with 4 bedrooms. This new type of search gets much closer to your real need.

Those are just standard workflows, that our beta users loved working with so far. But don’t hesitate to go off-track, there are still countless use cases for this new AI panel to be discovered.

Data & schedules

Data remains the poor child of the built world. To this day, linking information to drawings is something that designers still struggle to do. Excel files often live in the fringes of projects, and are almost entirely disconnected from the design work. This reality is not a fatality; or at least we firmly believe that a better experience awaits designers, provided architectural software embrace some of the best practices the SaaS world has created this past decades. V3 represents a big step in this direction.

With V3, designers can finally specify the information they need. Basic concepts, like length, price, cost etc. or more advanced ones like URL, product image, categories, linear cost, or even computed formulas can be created seamlessly in Rayon. V3 has been a race to nail the widest scope of data type we could build, while also offering to tag more things with it: walls, zones and blocks, but also, styles, layers, pages, etc.

All this data can finally be listed and curated in a proper scheduling interface. V3’s table panel offers an overhauled experience, where data can be aggregated, filtered, grouped etc. Our new table panel acts here essentially as a user-friendly spreadsheet experience.

And as no project ship as spreadsheet, but as schedules embedded in broader design presentations, we added the ability for users to insert their table in their work. Drawings, tables, mood boards, etc. can finally leave together, on a single canvas. From now on, product schedules, electrical spec sheets, legend tables, etc. are finally feasible at a fraction of the time and effort it used to take to make them with legacy workflows.

All in all, it is the idea of “light-BIM”, that is today taking a more tangible expression inside Rayon. As early as V2, we identified, speaking with users, how much the all-too-famous complexity of BIM left wide open an opportunity: that of offering a lighter way to work with objects and data within a CAD-like experience. V2 introduced this idea, and kick-started our journey in this direction. With V3 and our new data layer, we are furthering this intuition, giving it a much more robust shape.

Presentations

To us, the back-and-forth between clients and designers remained to this day the final area where SaaS best practices could offer a drastic make-over to the legacy way. V3 has been about seizing this opportunity. Away from the file-based, static export logic of the past decades, we learned a lot from users, asking us for an alternate experience, one where decks, presentations and portfolio could be built from a drawing file, and sent to a client as a live link. Shipping presentations has been all about answering this request.

With V3, any page set can be turned into a public slideshow in just a few clicks. The preview screen lets you review your work and confirm that everything is ready to share. From there, publishing is one click away. Rayon generates a public presentation link that works on any device.

Over the past months, we learned how central client updates are to your workflows. That’s why presentation links can be refreshed or revoked instantly. You stay in full control of what your clients see—and when they see it.

Presentations have been live for only a few months, and more than 10,000 have already been published. We’re seeing how quickly this feature has replaced the old “export → email → re-export → re-email” cycle that so many of you struggled with. It speeds up client iteration, gives you more control over the process, and dramatically reduces the effort required to keep everyone aligned.

To us, presentations are in fact a stepping stone. They represent the initial phase of a broader idea: the Rayon community. We firmly believe that the single most meaningful sign of success for a design tool is its ability to gather users, as a thriving community of designers, where drawings, assets and knowledge can be shared. Presentations, public models, templates are our first building blocks towards kick-starting the Rayon community. In 2026, our team will double down on this potential.

Something familiar

From day 1, it has been clear to us that switching is also a matter of familiarity and trust. A complete “tabula rasa” is out of the question for most of you in the industry. You need to work with the files you have, find the concepts you know, output the documents you need. To us, it is clear that this “scaffolding”, that underpins most legacy design-centric CADs, is a must-have. With V3, we have significantly deepened Rayon’s feature set to ensure our software registers some of these key concepts, and in this way, remains a familiar experience for most of you. This has meant closing the gap on some missing things, while clarifying how certain important concepts maps in Rayon.

Let’s talk about the big additions first...

References — We added a reference panel, that now allows bringing XREFs into Rayon seamlessly.
Parametric blocks — We introduced parametric blocks, a simple way to create blocks that can be reshaped based on user-actions and a robust support for AutoCAD’s dynamic blocks.
Commands — We added a lot of commands that we were missing: break, divide, angular dimension, revision cloud, etc.
DWG import/export — We worked much more on our DWG import/export. We now support a close-to-complete spectrum of features from the DWG format, both import and export.

There are, however, a few delightful details we would like to quickly spotlight...

Shortcut sets — They have been offered to the user for a few months already, ensuring you can either stick to the list of shortcuts you knew for your preferred legacy software, or embrace Rayon’s native set of shortcuts.
Text formatting — We have increased the set of options to style texts; support for bold, italic, underline, or even hyperlinks and list formatting have been added.
Gradients — Shapes can be filed with gradient patterns since August. This represents the last kind of DWG fill type we were missing until now.
Loop mode — Calling commands can be a bit tedious at times; especially when all you need is to repeat the same action again and again. We introduced the loop mode to get you closer to the call back logic of some legacy CAD tools.

This list could go on and on; all our product updates of the past 12 months will give you a clearer idea of all the quality-of-life improvement Rayon V3 represents. The important thing to realize is that a lot of them have been done so that Rayon remains a somewhat familiar experience, one that resonates with the practices you know.

Effortless

Effortless. This is the word that will guide Rayon from here on out. Our goal is unchanged: more simplicity, more seamlessness, less friction. A clearer, more opinionated interface. A feature set that stays out of your way. That is the mission.

And to that end, we believe AI is one of the greatest opportunities on the horizon for our industry. It is a technology that can turn out to be a major way to soften the CAD experience as a whole. That is why, with V3, we have committed to a few core principles. AI must be woven into the CAD experience, not bolted on the side. It must be iterative to stay relevant to designers. And it must work across modalities to unlock its full value for architecture.

This is the vision guiding our work in the months ahead. We will continue to build workflows that feel delightful, intuitive, and fast. And to do that well, we need your input. Tell us where the effort lies—whether in Rayon or in any other tool you use. Tell us what slows you down, what feels repetitive, what drains your creativity. AI is here to remove the hardest parts of your process. Your feedback will help us discover the next generation of powerful, agentic workflows built to serve you. Give us your input right here.