Flux Factory, Inc., a technology company founded to drive scalability, sustainability and efficiency improvements across the global building industry, today announced availability of its first product release. Flux is a cloud-based service for architects, engineers, and contractors to seamlessly exchange data, freeing professionals to focus on the higher value creative work, such as reducing cost and delivering performance-driven design.
Fueling its momentum Flux also announced it has raised $29 million in Series B financing, co-led by Temasek and Surbana Jurong Private Limited, with other investors including Far East Ventures (a subsidiary of Far East Organization, Singapore's largest private real estate developer), DFJ, South Park Ventures, Borealis Ventures, and Obvious Ventures. Nina Yang, COO of Singbridge, will join the Flux board of directors. Ms. Yang brings more than 25 years of experience in urban planning and building design, and has been responsible for numerous private buildings, large-scale infrastructure and urban transformation projects across Asia.
Rapid urbanization will continue to drive global demand for new housing and commercial buildings. An important step toward satisfying this demand will be to enable architects, engineers, and contractors to be more efficient and communicate more fluidly. This will ultimately help them create better buildings faster and more sustainably.
'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. 'Today, there are 1 billion people with substandard housing. By 2050, another 2 billion people will move into cities. Our industry needs to work together to develop new methodologies to meet this demand, while minimizing our usage of energy, water, and extracted resources.'
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. Rigorously tested over the last six months, Flux serves as an interchange point for sharing project data such as architectural requirements, schematic designs, analysis models, and material schedules.
'Flux has the potential to become the Google Translator of the digital design world,' said Chang-Yeon Cho, Digital Design Specialist, Gensler NY. 'As the design industry is facing ever increasing options of design software platforms, the premise of Flux is an important one -- the ability to stream data from one software platform to another via the cloud, presents exciting possibilities in ways professionals collaborate and explore their designs. Flux stands out for its ability to manage multiple sets of raw data in one place, and live stream it to multiple users.'
Available now, Flux delivers a significant innovation for AEC professionals. With Flux:
Each user or team can choose the best design or analysis tool for the task, without concern for compatibility issues
Data is synchronized across different tools without tedious file transfers and data conversions, creating a seamless project flow available anytime, anywhere
Changes in project requirements can automatically alert team members and trigger the workflow to rerun, allowing teams to respond more quickly and creatively to new project information
Dozens of early adopters are currently using Flux to improve design collaboration. Flux currently works with popular design software such as Grasshopper, Excel, and Dynamo. Subsequent plugins such as Revit, AutoCAD, 3ds Max and SketchUp are targeted for release in early 2016.
'Before Flux we were cobbling multiple tools together to transfer project data between design and documentation platforms, which was largely an ad hoc process. Flux has offered us a single framework within which all of our project data transactions can take place, giving us a more generalizable interoperability strategy that's easier to disseminate to our project teams around the globe,' said Brian Ringley, a Design Technology Platform Specialist at Woods Bagot. 'Collaboration is key to our business and we pride ourselves on doing it better than anyone else. With Flux giving us the ability to manage project permissions and collaborate on projects from anywhere in the world, we can deliver more complex projects faster.'
About FLUX
Flux was founded in 2012 with the ambitious goal of addressing two challenges facing the global building industry: demand for housing driven by urbanization and achieving sustainability driven by climate change. The Flux cloud-based collaboration service helps architects, engineers, and contractors to quickly exchange data, streamline complex design workflows, and ultimately work better together to meet the urgent need for affordable buildings. Flux is backed by DFJ, Temasek, Surbana Jurong, Far East Organization, South Park Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Borealis Ventures and Obvious Ventures. To learn more, visit https://flux.io