An Oslo startup that promises to shrink architectural rendering time from hours to minutes has landed $2.5 million in fresh funding, announced August 10, 2026, betting that the design industry's embrace of generative AI has room to accelerate further.
Visoid announced the seed round Monday, led by local early-stage firm Skyfall Ventures. StartupLab, OBOS, Antler, Farvatn and byFounders Angel Collective also participated, according to Axios Pro Rata. The company's pitch centers on speed: its software can turn sketches, 3D models and rough images into polished architectural visualizations in a fraction of the time traditional rendering requires, with the company claiming cuts of up to 90%.
It's a narrow but potentially lucrative niche. Architecture practices have begun weaving AI into workflows at a clip that surprised even industry observers. Recent surveys from the Royal Institute of British Architects indicate that nearly three-quarters of practices (74%) now use AI in at least some of their projects, a jump from lower adoption rates just a year or two prior.
Visoid has raised capital before. The startup secured roughly €700,000 (NOK 8 million) in March 2025 in an earlier round that included StartupLab, OBOS and Antler, according to reporting from Tech.eu. Since launching commercially in 2023, the platform had reportedly generated more than 6 million visualizations for customers spanning over 120 countries as of mid-2026, though those figures come from a job posting the company shared.
The tool itself plugs directly into Autodesk Revit, supporting recent versions of the widely used design software. Architects can adjust lighting conditions, seasonal backdrops and material choices iteratively without cycling through lengthy render queues. The company lists Nordic Office of Architecture, Leo A Daly and S+A among its clients, names that carry weight in the field but hardly guarantee dominance in a crowded market. Competitors like Veras, LookX and MNML offer similar AI-driven visualization features, and Visoid has acknowledged them in its own blog posts exploring rendering workflows.
CEO Mark Szoke brings firsthand architectural experience to the role. He spent time in proptech at Spacemaker and Rubus before co-founding Visoid. His co-founder and board chair, Joachim Blaafjell Holwech, holds a degree in biomedical cybernetics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and won a 2017 machine learning hackathon sponsored by Statoil and C-CORE. Holwech made waves online in 2026 by claiming that "100% of our code at VISOID is written by AI agents," a statement that invites as much scrutiny as admiration in an industry still parsing the boundaries of automated development.
The company employed nine people as of June 2026 based on a StartupLab job listing, though headcount may have shifted since.
Skyfall Ventures, the lead investor, operates out of Oslo and has backed more than 50 companies with five exits to its name. The firm announced a third fund targeting NOK 400 million (roughly $40 million) and now manages assets above NOK 1 billion. StartupLab, a repeat backer, closed its fifth founders fund at NOK 332 million in late 2025, according to industry outlet Shifter.
Knut Ramstad, CTO and partner at Nordic Office of Architecture, expressed optimism about the collaboration in comments to Shifter, noting the potential for AI to "optimize how architects work." Whether that optimism translates into long-term platform stickiness remains an open question, particularly as larger software incumbents pour resources into their own AI rendering features.
Visoid declined to detail how it plans to deploy the new capital. The company operates from Gaustadalléen 21 in Oslo and was incorporated in October 2023, according to Norwegian corporate records. For a startup barely past its second birthday, the traction appears solid. Whether it can carve out defensible ground in a market where the barriers to entry keep shrinking is another matter entirely.
