How Naya's founders turned a thesis into seed funding and won over 100 brands including Google!

It all began in a studio in Harvard’s Design School, in snowy cambridge back in January 2019. The founders of Naya, Saad and Vivek, huddled near a whiteboard discussing their thesis idea, collaborating on a shared vision. From a simple sketch, they envisioned a platform that would transform product design, filling a huge gap in how designers and studios collaborate and manage their work to bring something to life from a simple idea.

Naya is the first ever home for product design, built for design studios to power their projects from idea to reality. Design teams today jump from screens to studio tables to shop floors, creating an average of 500 unique assets per project (from 3D models to videos), working across over 10 software platforms (from figma to rhino) and collaborating with over 23 stakeholders (from engineers to end users). This makes the process messy, fragmented, slow, and expensive, leaving less time for creativity, sustainability, and listening to customers. Naya is a software for orchestrating the design process — a single platform where you can manage all your assets (models, videos, and more), integrate your favorite design platforms (miro, figma, google, and more) and coordinate with your key stakeholders (including core team members, fabricators, and AI collaborators). Ultimately collect the entire design journey in one place, ensuring you have a more seamless workflow and your team’s invaluable work and knowledge are documented for launching future projects, capturing IP, onboarding new team members, building case studies, and AI recommendations that are specific to improving your process and design. Naya was born out of Harvard’s Design School 4 years ago and is backed by VC like Maple, York, and DNX and executives at Figma, Pinterest, and Google. Today teams from Mumbai to Milan and Microsoft to MillerKnoll are using the platform to create the next generations of products that are more creative, thoughtful, inclusive, and sustainable.

The Inception
From celebrity private jets to winter clothing to commercial towers – Vivek and Saad brought together over ten years of experience in developing products. With this experience, their mission to make it easier to bring physical products to life, was very clear.

The First Prototype:
The thought was simple - An app for creating design briefs where one could explain their idea more clearly, making it easier for others to understand; and help design and build it.

Its Evolution:
This was a great solution but it was only solving one step in the journey. Saad mentioned, "We wanted an end to end solution, so we matched our design briefs with designers and builders. We zeroed in on furniture design — a field between architecture and graphic design in complexity.”

First Big Win:
They launched a contest at the GSD, offering to bring the best design briefs to life, and received over 200 applications in a day, signalling strong interest. After 300 interviews, launching three prototypes in a month, and creating ten unique pieces, they presented their thesis to a thesis board consisting of academics and industry leaders. “Many of our mentors urged us to go forward. We debated between big-tech and design consulting but decided in the end to continue developing Naya while working part-time to pay the bills.

The Second Version
"One of the bottlenecks in this process was communication among the stakeholders, from the designers to the fabricators to the client." With this realization, they began building a collaborative platform to facilitate communication. It started as no more complex than a basic messaging platform but quickly evolved into a collaborative-design tool. This was still connected to the network of designers and makers.

Choosing the right market
The founders saw a bigger chance in B2B after initially focusing on selling directly to consumers with both a marketplace and a platform. “A lot of enterprises wanted support to build out custom products, our platform was the perfect end to end solution” This pivot towards catering to custom products and batch orders from enterprises such as MillerKnoll and Google validated the platform's value. This move alone generated a pipeline worth $10M in revenue and secured $750K in funding from angel investors and mentors.

Need for a Strategic Shift
They soon realised that the industry was based on relationships and the marketplace would not be sticky long term. They also found the platform had to be supplemented with managing projects and quality control. This would not scale.

In the third version of their evolution, Naya decided to focus on just software with a semi-developed platform to help stakeholders better plan and communicate through the design and development process. They decided to raise money on this thesis.

Securing the Seed Funding
After this insight, in 2021, Naya's path took a significant leap forward, securing a $5.75M seed funding round led by DNX, Maple Ventures, and York, alongside Harvard mentors and angel investors from leading global companies, including the co-founder of Pinterest and the CFO of Figma. This funding was a milestone, enabling Naya to further develop its vision into a complete platform.

"Naya is the perfect combination of creativity and organisation."
Evan Sharp, Co-founder of Pinterest

“We kept building tools that other platforms already had.”
After going through multiple iterations and receiving invaluable feedback from early adopters, a fundamental issue was brought to light:

1. The challenge in realising product ideas was not a shortage of effective design tools, but the fragmented use of numerous tools across different stages of the design process.
2. This fragmentation led to misalignment, compromised efficiency, wasted efforts, and a decrease in realized ideas.

This spurred a strategic shift for Naya, positioning it as the integrator that seamlessly connects diverse tools and processes, simplifying the entire design journey.
100 Companies fell in love with the product!
“Since the start, our priority has been to work closely with our users,” Saad explains.The feedback loop with its users is so integral to our design process. The platform just hit a major product goal. They had 100 brands from large to boutique say they love the product. They achieved this by working with a select group of diverse teams and continuing to get recurring feedback until they hit certain engagement metrics that were both quantitative and qualitative. The team measures success by the 'love' users have for the product, using interviews, surveys, and product metrics over two years to accurately track this affection.

Today, Naya is starting a movement where companies large and small, from Google to boutique studios, can create a true home for the entire design journey. With the entire journey existing in one place, there is a rich set of data that is being used to help generate new designs and come up with process recommendations.

Looking Forward
Naya is deeply committed to continuously fine-tune its journey-building platform with meaningful AI enhancements, setting out to become a necessary tool in every designer team’s toolkit. On the brink of exciting growth, its vision is to empower creators everywhere, making design more inclusive, creative, and efficient. For more information on the platform, visit www.naya.studio.