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Isn't it neat that generations of cells sitting in an electrolyte soup could create…
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Kane Hsieh shared thisRotary feeder for bluefin tuna farming at Australian Fishing Enterprises.
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Kane Hsieh shared thisVoltage Helicopters chief pilot Layton Howell rigs power lines with a Hughes 500D.
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Kane Hsieh reposted thisKane Hsieh reposted thisToday, we’re launching illoca Tracing Paper and announcing our $13M Seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. In my last two posts, I wrote about the tool I always wanted as an architect, and the thesis that shaped my work over the past decade at Autodesk AI Lab and Google DeepMind: bridging the gap between hand-based thinking and expression, and mouse-based drafting workflows. My co-founder, Chiaowei Yu, had lived that same gap from the other side, through years of architectural practice and later leading BIM at Tesla. That is what brought us together to start Illoca. Today, we’re bringing that answer into the world. Architectural design is not a linear process. It moves through options, feedback, trade-offs, and constant refinement. But too often, every meaningful step still triggers another round of production, and that keeps breaking the flow. When testing an idea takes too long, fewer ideas get tested. When iteration is slow, design settles. Tracing Paper is built around how architects actually work: through sketches, markups, references, conversations, and iteration. The goal is for agents to take on more of the production work in the background, so architects can stay in the flow of design. I’m deeply grateful to our team, our early users and design partners, including Yasuhiro Nakano and the team at Kajima Corporation, our advisor Jiajun Wu, and our investors, including Maha Malik and the Bessemer Venture Partners team, AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, Alt Capital, and Sabrina Hahn of SH Fund. After years of building pieces of this idea through research, it means a lot to finally share it with the world. Now begins the next decade of building it together. Try Tracing Paper. Link in the first comment.
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Kane Hsieh reposted thisKane Hsieh reposted thisToday, we’re launching illoca Tracing Paper and announcing our $13M Seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, SH Fund by Sabrina Hahn, and Alt Capital, as well as angel investor Adam Zobler. Tracing Paper is a new interface for architectural design, built for the way architects actually work. Architects design by exploring ideas, comparing options, and working through constraints and trade-offs. But each step still has to be tested through drawings and models, and creating those representations manually interrupts the flow. Tracing Paper helps keep that flow intact, translating sketches, markups, references, and natural language into editable 2D and 3D designs, so teams can push the design further before time and tools force them to settle. Early partners like Kajima Corporation are already using Tracing Paper to accelerate iteration and arrive at better design outcomes. To our early users, design partners, investors, and team: thank you for helping bring this to life. To those who shape the world, this is for you. Try it free: illoca.com
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Kane Hsieh shared thisA home in the Central Valley uses a drone swarm to direct deliveries.
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Kane Hsieh shared thisAero Spacelines Super Guppy Turbine landing at Lakeland International Airport.
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Kane Hsieh liked thisKane Hsieh liked thisCouldn't make it to nTop Summit 2026 in LA? The full session library is now available on demand — every talk, every workflow demo, every honest discussion about what's working (and what isn't) in engineering design today. Speakers from Ansys, Specter Aerospace, PhysicsX, Siemens Energy, and others spent the day getting into the specifics: AI/ML for simulation, parametric turbomachinery design, next-gen aircraft workflows, and what deploying these tools actually looks like at scale. Start with one session. You probably won't stop there. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/eZPcxiiw
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Kane Hsieh liked thisKane Hsieh liked thisBefore I share what we’ve been building at illoca, I want to share how it all began. About 8 years ago, I attended a AEC conference where Chin-Yi Cheng shared his perspective on the future of AI in architecture. At the time, it felt distant and almost unrealistic. AEC has always been grounded in the physical world, with workflows shaped by incremental improvements rather than fundamental change. Fast forward to 2024. I found myself at another industry discussion and this time, generative AI was no longer theoretical. It was very real, but still very uncertain in how it would ultimately reshape the built world. As I watched the initial demos of what the future could look like, I had a moment of recognition. I had seen the vision of this before, eight years earlier, led by Chin-Yi. That moment stayed with me. In a striking coincidence, I received a message from him that very same day: “Hi, long time no see! Do you have time tomorrow to chat about an idea?” We connected the next day. What was meant to be a short conversation turned into hours of unpacking the gaps in existing tools and imagining what a better future could look like. It quickly became clear we were perfectly aligned on both the problem and the opportunity. So, we decided to build illoca together. 18 months later, that vision has become a reality. Today, I’m incredibly excited to share that Illoca has raised a $13M seed round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, SH Fund (thank you Sabrina Hahn!), Alt Ventures, and our amazing angel investor Adam Zobler. This milestone wouldn’t be possible without our incredible team, who have brought this vision to life, and the support of our advisor, Jiajun Wu, whose guidance has been invaluable along the way. We’re launching our first product, illoca Tracing Paper, a new layer for architectural design where ideas move directly from intention to execution. We’re just getting started. 😊
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Kane Hsieh liked thisKane Hsieh liked this"We have a 6-month queue for a PCB designer's time, with no one in the pipeline to hire." That's a US defense contractor describing the problem we hear about from almost every team we talk to: not enough engineering capacity. The electrical engineer shortage isn't a hiring cycle. It's a 50-year structural decline. - US electrical engineering enrollment is down roughly 90% vs. computer science since the 1980s - 3 engineers retire for every 2 entering the workforce - 77% of firms report difficulty hiring qualified electrical engineers If you can't convert the hiring budget into a human engineer, you can convert it into engineering capacity in another form. We'll be upfront: we naturally benefit from making this argument. Quilter automates PCB layout, so the team you already have can ship more boards in less time. However, no single product can close a gap of this size. While more experienced engineers retire, industries that depend on custom electronics (defense, automotive, aerospace, energy, AI/computing) are all growing simultaneously competing for the same finite talent pool. Our goal is to be a part of the solution to this problem. Read our latest blog for more details, link in comments. #PCBDesign #AIforHardware
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Kane Hsieh liked thisKane Hsieh liked thisIn my last post, I wrote that the tool I really wanted still did not exist. So for years, I tried to build pieces of it through AI research. Coming from architecture, I never thought AI for architectural design should work like a vending machine: make a request, get a building back, and choose whether to accept it. What I was looking for was not just a better model, but a way for AI to work with architects while a design is still taking shape. A design does not unfold in one format. It starts as a thought, then moves through sketches, diagrams, plans, models, constraints, references, markups, and conversations. Each representation reveals something different. Each one carries part of the intent. And the design keeps changing as architects move between them. So the real challenge was not just generation. It was whether a system could understand those representations, translate between them, and respond while the design was still forming. That thinking has shaped much of my research since 2017. BIM-GAN asked whether sketches, diagrams, and floor plans could move fluidly between one another. House-GAN and Building-GAN asked whether early planning diagrams could become floor plans and building massing. PLay and CoLay asked whether constraints, such as grid lines, could become part of the design intent itself. SkexGen and CLIP-Forge asked how complex 3D forms could be represented through modeling steps and language. Different research projects, but the same underlying thesis: Keep the design process continuous, instead of turning every shift in thinking into another round of manual translation. This is why I kept returning to a diagram like this in talks over the years. It captured the idea I was building toward: an AI collaborator that helps architects move across the many ways they express intent and develop a design.
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Kane Hsieh liked thisKane Hsieh liked thisToday, we’re launching illoca Tracing Paper and announcing our $13M Seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. In my last two posts, I wrote about the tool I always wanted as an architect, and the thesis that shaped my work over the past decade at Autodesk AI Lab and Google DeepMind: bridging the gap between hand-based thinking and expression, and mouse-based drafting workflows. My co-founder, Chiaowei Yu, had lived that same gap from the other side, through years of architectural practice and later leading BIM at Tesla. That is what brought us together to start Illoca. Today, we’re bringing that answer into the world. Architectural design is not a linear process. It moves through options, feedback, trade-offs, and constant refinement. But too often, every meaningful step still triggers another round of production, and that keeps breaking the flow. When testing an idea takes too long, fewer ideas get tested. When iteration is slow, design settles. Tracing Paper is built around how architects actually work: through sketches, markups, references, conversations, and iteration. The goal is for agents to take on more of the production work in the background, so architects can stay in the flow of design. I’m deeply grateful to our team, our early users and design partners, including Yasuhiro Nakano and the team at Kajima Corporation, our advisor Jiajun Wu, and our investors, including Maha Malik and the Bessemer Venture Partners team, AIX Ventures, Root Ventures, Alt Capital, and Sabrina Hahn of SH Fund. After years of building pieces of this idea through research, it means a lot to finally share it with the world. Now begins the next decade of building it together. Try Tracing Paper. Link in the first comment.
Experience
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Education
Honors & Awards
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Pokedex Completion Diploma
GAMEFREAK
Research fellowship in the Oak Laboratory
Test Scores
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Voigt-Kampff Test
Score: Pass
20-30 cross-referenced questions.
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Nate Loewentheil
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Nick Durham
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Benjamin Gordon
AI isn't just powering software. BrightAI just raised $51 million to automate inspection and other hardware-based AI capabilities. As Alexa von Tobel, co-founder of Inspired Capital put it: “So many people are so focused on the future of digital AI, but we’re excited about this new layer of AI: the physical world AI.” We are in the early innings of a series of AI-fueled innovations! https://lnkd.in/enhmafvH
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FiNext Private
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Pulse 2.0
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CommercialEVs.com
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Jose Garcia Pacheco
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