Cloud-based design service speeds up 3D models for China’s home decorators

Getting the keys to a brand-new home is just the beginning for many middle-class Chinese home buyers. They typically face months of negotiations with interior designers and builders to decorate and furnish the empty rooms – and some are even enticed by realistic 3D renderings that can show exactly what the finished home will look like.

Photo credit: Keresi72

However, many buyers become impatient because a single change to the design can mean a few more days of rendering, so they end up going with a much faster 2D graphic instead, according to Wu Yue, owner of the North Home Technology design firm in Hangzhou.

“It’s necessary for customers to see the finished render. Otherwise, they can only imagine the final result, which is likely to be very different from the design,” he said.

Stepping in to fill that void is a Hangzhou-based startup whose three co-founders have used their computer graphics backgrounds to find a way to speed up the process from days to minutes.

Traditional rendering software like 3D Max is slow because it requires a large amount of memory and stores the render files on a computer, said Chen Hang, co-founder and CEO of online design platform Kujiale.com.

To overcome that bottleneck, the Kujiale R&D center in Hangzhou, China assigns the rendering job to a cluster of more than 3,000 distributed computers and nearly 10,000 virtual servers in the cloud.

Chen, along with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumni Huangxiao Huang and Zhu Hao, saw an opportunity in the home decoration market and founded Kujiale in 2011 as a cloud software service platform to speed up the interior decoration process for homeowners and designers.

Homeowners and designers can find floor plans from the Kujiale database – which covers 90% of floor plans in China – by entering the name of the community and living area. They can then select furniture from a list of 3D models and, after deciding on a style, render the images before proceeding to the next step of purchasing directly from an online list of vendors.

A keen user of Kujiale’s proprietary design software, Wu is an interior designer with more than 10 years of designing experience. Now, he makes changes on his laptop within hours instead of days and keeps customers on the hook by showing them the progress of rendering. This keeps customers from losing interest and looking for other designers. More importantly, the final result that the customer gets at home is very close to what they saw in the rendered 3D model, said Wu.

“[Before Kujiale,] the user experience was usually bad. Homeowners became impatient and would often cancel the order because they didn’t want to wait three days for rendering after each change was made,” said Wu. “Decoration firms didn’t want to take the risk so they skipped the rendering part and provided only a 2D floor plan with numerous lines on it, which was hard for customers to understand.”

In 2018, Kujiale generated revenues of 400 million yuan (US$56 million) on a customer base of more than 15 million homeowners and 14,000 commercial enterprises. It taps into 6.5 million registered designers, which accounts for 40% of interior designers in China.

Kujiale’s revenues are derived from subscriptions, and its main business focus is the commercial market. In one recent example, the Nando’s restaurant chain used the service to design more than 40 restaurants around the world. Homeowners can design basic living spaces for free but are charged a fee for more advanced designs and enterprise packages.

The company claims a market share of more than 70% and a valuation of US$600 million. Last year it raised US$100 million in a series D funding round led by Shunwei Capital Partners and other existing investors, including IDG Capital Partners, GGV Capital, and Yunqi Partners. A series D+ round is in the works, according to Chen.