Magazine

I worked as a design team leader at an interior company, handling residential, commercial, and public-sector projects. Korea's construction market is worth more than KRW 230 trillion, yet across architecture, structure, landscape, MEP, and interiors, the same inefficient process was being repeated: people manually built 3D models from 2D drawings. Every time the design changed, that 3D modeling work had to start again from the beginning. I decided to start the business after seeing too much time and too many resources being spent on repetitive work instead of the design work that actually mattered.

Traditionally, creating a 3D model from a 2D CAD drawing can take several days per drawing and requires multiple stages of manual work. From organizing layers to placing walls and windows and producing 3D renderings, almost everything is done by hand, consuming significant project resources.

Moulder uses an AI engine to convert a 2D CAD drawing into a 3D BIM model in just five minutes, with AI rendering generated in the same process. The AI can accurately interpret real-world drawings created in many different styles, reducing working time by more than 90% and compressing days of modeling and rendering into a single drawing upload.

Real-world drawings vary greatly depending on the drafter or company. The most challenging cases are drawings where CAD layers are not organized at all or where lines overlap and become tangled. Curved walls, irregular structures, and split-level plans with ambiguous height differences are also difficult for conventional rule-based algorithms to interpret.

To solve this, Moulder built an AI drawing-recognition engine trained on a large volume of real-world drawing data. Even with non-standard layers and complex drawing structures, it can accurately extract and classify spatial context and key structural elements such as walls, doors, and windows, then convert them into stable 3D BIM models.

Countless new CAD and 3D tools have been launched, but they come with learning barriers, and architecture and interior projects involve many different stakeholders, making it difficult to move everyone onto a new program. In practice, clients still routinely require AutoCAD, SketchUp, and Revit files as standard deliverables.

So rather than building a new program and forcing users to learn it, we decided it made more sense to improve productivity while preserving the existing workflow. We started with a service that automatically converts CAD drawings into SketchUp models, and from the beginning we were able to attract many customers organically without spending separately on marketing.

Based on that traction, BuildingPoint Korea, an official Trimble partner, contacted us first and that led to collaboration. Moulder's core value is 'Seamless.' Our goal is for customers to feel an immediate improvement in efficiency within the tools they already use, without additional training.

Moulder is moving beyond simple 2D-to-3D conversion by incorporating property information contained in drawings and extending it into BIM data. Based on automatically generated BIM, we aim to make processes such as construction management and quantity takeoff faster and easier. We are currently conducting related PoCs with several major Korean companies.

At the same time, we are focused on advancing the AI engine itself. We are moving beyond the limitations of early LLMs, where performance depended heavily on input quality, toward a more robust engine that can accurately interpret low-quality drawings as well. We also plan to expand beyond floor-plan-based conversion by incorporating reflected ceiling plans, elevations, and sections, creating more precise 3D models and enabling users to check consistency across different drawings.

The greatest benefit was being able to hear directly from the people working on site — design teams, construction teams, and cost teams — and refine the service into a solution that truly fits their needs. At a Hoban Construction site, for example, we applied the system to automatically create 3D models for every unit in an apartment project, including interior finishes, fire protection, and electrical systems. Once unit-specific option information is added to the 2D CAD drawings, the AI recognizes it accurately and automatically converts every unit into a real-time 3D model.

Complex option schedules that were previously checked manually on paper or in Excel can now be reviewed at a glance through 3D data. By integrating them with structural models in Trimble Connect, we were also able to replace manual calculations with accurate, 3D-data-based quantity takeoff for finishing materials.

Our vision is 'Architecting the Standard' — creating a new standard for the construction market. The global construction market, worth more than KRW 10 quadrillion, suffers from enormous inefficiencies because information and data remain fragmented across different trades.

Starting with AI drawing recognition and BIM data generation, Moulder aims to build a 'data layer' that becomes the foundation of the spatial business and ultimately create a 'construction OS' that connects the industry as a whole. Five years from now, we want Moulder to be a global infrastructure solution that serves as the starting point for design and construction projects not only in Korea, but across architecture and interior jobsites worldwide.