Upgrade on schedule for Interior designers after start-up Programa raises $7.5m

Melbourne start-up Programa, which has developed a platform for interior designers and has grand plans to take on US company Houzz, has raised $7.5m in a round led by EVP.

Programa co-founders Traviss Orr, Claudio Oyarce and Zoe Lowres. Picture: Supplied,

A Melbourne start-up founded during Covid-19 lockdowns by a couple and the man behind one of Australia’s largest interior design trade shows has raised $7.5m to grow their platform for designers.

Programa was founded by Traviss Orr, his partner Zoe Lowres and Claudio Oyarce in 2020, and has since grown to 2000 paying interior designers.

The platform, which allows interior designers to manage projects, track orders and will soon help facilitate sales between suppliers and customers, is now used in more than 65 countries and has over 25,000 active projects.

The start-up is looking to tackle what many have described as one of the last industries to lag behind on technological advances.

Interior design and architecture has long been a manual process, with many firms often assigning juniors to handle orders and procurement rather than use their skills, said Mr Orr, Programa’s chief executive.

“The interior design and architecture industry is sort of one of the last industries that hasn’t really felt the benefit of software,” he said.

“They’ve got software for the design process for physical drawing platforms, but everything else in the industry is basically done in spreadsheets.”

Ms Lowres, a former interior designer who has worked in large firms and run her own practice, said manual processing was irritating to many designers. “I suppose it was my frustration with the design process that led us to found Programa,” she said.

Mark Velik, Investment Principal at Early-Stage Ventures (EVP).

While Programa exists as an end-to-end platform, the core of the business lay within the ability to produce a schedule, Ms Lowres said. “The backbone of our system is the product schedule, and the level of detail that we offer in our product specifications is over and above what any of the other platforms are offering,” she said.

Programa allows an interior designer to search up products, and automatically import their data to its schedule should they purchase those products.

“It will automatically add that to my schedule and it literally means that I can go from sourcing to specifying and scheduling in a matter of seconds, whereas previously that would have taken me 15 minutes,” Ms Lowres said.

That same aggregation and instant scheduling was what was ­attracting a number ofseveral brands to the platform, Mr Oyarce said.

“It offers suppliers quite a unique opportunity when it comes to data-driven intelligence, because it allows them to kind ofreally understand how their products are actually being perceived or how they’re performing in the market,” he said. “(Through Programa) they’re actually getting live analytics.”

The capital raise was led by EVP. Its investment principal, Mark Velik, said his firm was excited to back a start-up tackling longstanding issues in the interior design industry. “From the first day we met the Programa team, we were taken by their compelling vision to revolutionise the way designers and brands operate,” he said.

“The design industry represents one of the few remaining markets still dominated by pen and paper, excel spreadsheets and clunky legacy software, making it a prime candidate for disruptive software.”

“Traviss, Zoe and Claudio are the perfect team to tackle this problem, bringing decades of experience working with designers, brands and scaling technology businesses.”

Most people didn’t realise how important spreadsheets and scheduling were for interior designers and architects, Mr Orr said. “Wherever you are at the moment, be it your house or office, that building or structure would have begun as a spreadsheet at one point in its life with everything from door handles to lights, chairs and walls in that spreadsheet,” he said. “We take that spreadsheet and allow people to visualise it.”