Chin-Yi Cheng is Co-Founder and CEO of Illoca, an AI-native design platform built to return creative agency to architects operating within a $12 trillion global construction industry.

Chin-Yi earned his degree from MIT and built a decade-long research career as a Principal Researcher at the Autodesk AI Lab (2019-2022) and then as a Researcher at Google DeepMind (2022-2024), pioneering generative AI for architectural design.

Chin-Yi identified that architects lose over 1,300 hours per year to manual production work, a $720 billion industry-wide inefficiency he set out to eliminate through intelligent, intent-driven software.

Together with co-founder Chiaowei Yu, Chin-Yi launched Illoca in 2024 and closed a $13M Seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, and Alt Ventures.

Illoca's flagship product, Tracing Paper, is already redefining the project lifecycle for global partners like Kajima Corporation, enabling architects to convert sketches and natural language directly into editable 2D and 3D designs.