Google X Alum Flux Factory Raises $29M Series B

One of Google X’s former moonshots is raising cash as it looks to disrupt the architecture design space with its specialized collaborative data exchange service.

Flux Factory, Inc. announced $29 million in Series B funding co-led by Temasek and Surbana Jurong Private Limited. Far East Ventures, DFJ, South Park Ventures, Borealis Ventures, and Obvious Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised $8 million to date from investors like Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Flux sees its worth in its ability to help the planet adapt. The company says that by 2050 there will be another two billion people living in cities on Earth. The company says its engineered architecture tools will help the world’s architects and builders attack problems in the most sustainable and efficient ways possible.

One item that is apparent from the list of investors joining this raise, is the heavily important role Flux sees in Asian markets as the SF-based company moves forward.

If the company sounds wildly ambitious, it may just be in its genes. Flux Factory was founded in late-2010 in the Google X Labs, where it was one of the company’s moonshot candidates before it was spun out into a distinct private venture.

The company’s first project is aimed at assisting architects and building professionals to save precious time when swapping files and making changes. The cloud-based collaboration service allows contractors, engineers and architects to add helpful plugins into their existing work flows and saves them crucial time in simplifying file transfer, data conversion, and data-merge.

The company details the process more in a press release.

Until now, sharing and executing new ideas across the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) value chain have been hindered by cumbersome interoperability among the numerous software applications used during a project lifecycle. Low value tasks such as merging changes or converting data takes significant time from the creative work. In contrast, Flux provides seamless data exchange between industry design tools such as Rhino and Revit.

Flux is currently building up its support for some of the most popular pieces of design software. It currently is compatible with programs like Grasshopper, Excel, and Dynamo and is looking to add support in early 2016 for popular tools like Revit, AutoCAD, 3ds Max and SketchUp.

“Collaboration tools are critical infrastructure elements to address the urgent need for affordable and sustainable buildings for an urbanizing world,” said Nicholas Chim, Flux’s co-Founder, in a statement. “Our industry needs to work together to develop new methodologies to meet this demand, while minimizing our usage of energy, water, and extracted resources.”

In addition to the funding news, Flux announced that Nina Yang, COO of Singbridge, will join the Flux board of directors.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Windows 7 and 8.1 Update to Windows 10 automatically

Windows 10 downloader While it might be a bit too early to start getting excited over the Windows 10 update , which isn't expected to arrive until summer, Microsoft seems to already be warming up people's computers just the same. A recommended, and therefore purely optional, update for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8.1 has been discovered to be laying the groundwork for those machines' eventual upgrade to Windows 10. Although the Windows 10 release date was not announced officially, the details of this update also reveal how Microsoft might try to convince users to update to the latest Windows 10 version. The KB3035583 update "enables additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user", which sounds pretty common. That is, until you dig into the update files and see a certain GWXUXWorker.exe which, upon further inspection, would actually "Download Windows 10". So this rather ...

Anyline Raises €1.5M To Let You Add Optical Character Recognition To Your App

Anyline , the Austrian startup that provides mobile OCR tech to enable developers to add text recognition to their own apps, has raised €1.5 million in funding. The list of investors is interesting, too. It includes angel investor Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, busuu co-founder Bernhard Niesner, Lukas Püspök, and the U.S.-based VC-fund iSeed Ventures. However, most notable is that the round was led by Gernot Langes-Swarovski Group. As one investor put it to me, “the fact that the Swarovski family led the round shows that finally ‘old’ money is moving into Austrian startups”. Offering its own mobile Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology — which uses a smartphone’s camera to accurately scan and recognise any kind of text, code or number — Anyline co-founder and CEO Lukas Kinigadner tells me the startup is built on the premise that “people screw up a lot”. “Mistakes happen easily when you’re writing down a 10-digit-number and then have to type it in again a few moments later...

Three Reasons Why You Need Better Personal Cyber security

From the infamous Sony hack to the recent WannaCry virtual catastrophe that affected over 300,000 computers, the need for reliable personal cyber security has never been more apparent. Rubica's skilled team of experts want to remind every one of the importance of cyber security and the three reasons why it is becoming a more pressing issue every day. With top-notch personal cyber security, most attacks are preventable. 1. Larger Number Of Attacks Americans have heard of the most notable attacks on major corporations or government entities over the past several years. However, most people who are not in the information security field do not learn just how much the attack frequency is growing. The number of cyber attacks carried out worldwide in 2015 was quadruple a number of attacks recorded in 2013. Although the cost associated with the number of annual recorded attacks is in the $500 billion range right now, experts say that it will grow well into the trillions by ...

Insure Your Family by Controlling Devices Through an App

AIR: YOUR SMART HOME Have you ever rushed to your house suspecting that you may have accidently kept the iron turned on? How do you deter a burglar from breaking into your house? You probably would rush to your house and manually turn off the switch in the first instance, and get a burglar alarm for the next. But what if there were a single solution for both? Humans are delegating a lot of menial and repetitive tasks to machines. And as far as errands in your house and offices are concerned, the good news is – you can control appliances through your smart phone. INTRODUCING AIR: YOUR SMART HOME Air app, which is available on both Android and Apple platforms, interacts with your devices and switches them off with a single tap. AIR MOBILE APP The app is complemented with a package that consists of a pentagonal-shaped unit and switchboard module. Once you install air unit; your smartphone can interact with it using the Air App. Thereafter, the unit instructs the...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog