Drafted
- The AI startup Drafted has raised $16 million to make custom home design more accessible.
- Its founder says Silicon Valley has long overlooked people who want to design homes.
- Investors include Y Combinator, Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann, and OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder.
People have vibe-coded apps for all sorts of tasks, from nutrition planning to babysitting gigs to grocery shopping. Soon, you may be able to vibe-code your home design.
That's the idea behind Drafted, a nine-month-old startup that uses AI to turn home-design ideas into floor plans and 3D layouts. Founded by Nick Donahue, Drafted has raised a $16 million seed round from investors including Buckley Ventures, Y Combinator, Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann, and OneRepublic front man Ryan Tedder. Donahue, the CEO, declined to share the company's valuation.
Instead of using expensive professional design software, users can enter details such as lot size, home size, and room count. Then, they can describe the type of house they want and instantly generate floor plans and 3D renderings. They can tinker with the design and get updated plans in seconds.
"Designing a home today requires navigating fragmented tools and highly manual workflows," said Donahue. "We're building a system where you can shape a home as easily as you shape software."
Drafted previously raised $1.65 million at a $35 million valuation from investors including Patrick Collison and Jack Altman.
Donahue grew up around the homebuilding industry. His father built homes for major developers, and his mother ran East Coast sales for Home Depot.
Drafted is not his first attempt to make home design easier. Donahue previously ran Atmos, a startup that used technology to streamline the custom home design process. The company operated for seven years and raised about $20 million from investors, including Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, and Sam Altman. Donahue shut it down in early 2025 as high interest rates made it harder for customers to afford the homes they had spent months designing.
Donahue couldn't stay away for long. This time, he built Drafted around AI.
"This is what I've never understood about Silicon Valley. They're like, who wants to design a house?" he said. "I'm like, OK, maybe we don't build here, but for most people, in most places, their home is the most important, like outside of their family."
Since launching five months ago, 250,000 people have visited Drafted's website, Donahue said, and in the past month, users have generated over 300,000 floor plans. Donahue said that more than a third of website visitors are homebuyers. Other users include architects, builders, and developers.
The San Francisco-based startup is trying to carve out a middle ground between hiring an architect and buying a stock house plan online. The first option can be expensive and slow; the second is cheaper but rigid. Donahue says Drafted can offer more customization at a lower price, with basic plan sets expected to cost around $1,000.
Architects and builders already use tools like Autodesk, Planner 5D, and Homestyler. Donahue is betting Drafted can offer a simpler starting point for both consumers and architects, before a project moves into more formal design work.
"We invested because Drafted sits at the intersection of a huge consumer behavior and a very practical need," said Josh Buckley, founder of Buckley Ventures and an early investor in companies including Applied Intuition, Physical Intelligence, and Figma. "People don't just want pretty AI images; they want to explore what their actual future home could look like, iterate on it, and eventually make decisions around it."
Drafted's growth strategy borrows from Donahue's teenage years playing Minecraft. He would spend hundreds of hours building maps in creative mode, turning empty space into Hunger Games-style arenas with mountains, forests, and villages. Before releasing the maps, he invited YouTubers to play the game on a joint livestream to generate buzz.
He's now using a similar strategy to promote Drafted, recruiting around 20 creators a month to try the product and share their experiences.
Donahue said the company plans to start charging for basic plan sets within the next three to six months.
Read the original article on Business Insider