From AI-powered design to direct purchasing: Elephantroom aims to conquer the furniture market, which, according to a press release issued by the start-up, is worth €650 billion, by eliminating the so-called ‘designer’s block’ with a deep-tech architecture that combines spatial intelligence, an infinite database of furniture and interactive 3D and VR visualisation, to automate the purchasing process.
Elephantroom’s mission is to transform interior design from an obstacle course into a seamless and accessible experience, aiming to revolutionise the furniture market through the seamless integration of 3D, interactive VR and generative AI.
Founded by Lora Fahmy, a computational architect with experience at KPF and NASA, and Alessandro Duico, an AI engineer and former student at TU Delft (pictured), Elephantroom has announced its technology roadmap for the creation of the first furniture marketplace based on real-world design.
Elephantroom is not just the solution to a common problem, but the result of a technical convergence rarely seen in the industry. It all stems from an operational paradox: Lora Fahmy encountered market inefficiency whilst furnishing a new home in Milan. Even for those who are experts in the world’s most advanced design software, the process appeared fragmented, slow and lacking in true commercial integration.
Around the same time, Alessandro Duico returned to Italy to develop advanced AI projects, and met Lora. For him, the idea was not merely an aesthetic one, but a structural challenge: how could the complexity of a room be translated into actionable data and intelligent layouts? The decisive spark came courtesy of Liquid Factory, the venture builder that recognised the explosive potential of bringing these two figures together. It was within this ecosystem that Fahmy’s vision of architectural spatiality merged with Duico’s ability to build AI models capable of ‘understanding’ real-world geometry. Together, they decided to tackle ‘the elephant in the room’ – namely, a €650 billion furniture industry stifled by analogue processes – by transforming the burden of decision-making into a scalable asset. Elephantroom was therefore born not merely as an app, but as an entrepreneurial mission: to define the technological standard that will allow anyone to design and purchase their living space with a single click.
Whilst the hype surrounding generative AI produces aesthetically pleasing but geometrically impossible renderings, Elephantroom has built its strength on spatial accuracy. At its technological core lies an architecture that integrates a graphics engine typically reserved for gaming. In just two seconds, the system generates hundreds of functional layouts that adhere to real-world dimensions and circulation flows, ensuring that every solution displayed is technically feasible and ready for checkout. This level of geometric precision is constantly being refined in the code under development to ensure the app’s ongoing evolution, starting with the living room – currently the only active area – with a view to extending the predictive algorithm to all other areas of the home in the future.
The key to Elephantroom’s scalability lies in its ability to digitise retail catalogues at an unprecedented speed. Thanks to a proprietary AI scraper system powered by a large language model (LLM), the start-up is able to read brands’ product pages and transform them into 3D digital objects complete with metadata such as dimensions, prices and materials, in just a few hours, without any need for manual modelling. This allows the platform to aggregate the offerings of giants such as IKEA, JYSK and Westwing, alongside those of small local manufacturers, into a single VR/AR-ready digital ecosystem, where users can virtually test the furniture in their own virtual space before purchasing.
Elephantroom is therefore not a design tool, but a highly efficient transactional marketplace designed to evolve constantly over time, through data, real-world usage and ongoing interaction with its community. The B2B2C business model is designed to maximise the value of every user session through three revenue streams: sales commissions, pay-per-click for qualified traffic, and recurring fees from retail partners. This approach transforms Elephantroom into the new Pinterest of interior design, where inspiration is not a static photo but a direct sales funnel, made even more digital.
With a pre-seed investment of €200,000 already secured and organic traction amounting to millions of views, the roadmap now focuses on international expansion and the consolidation of an active community made up of ordinary people who want to share their projects. The ultimate goal is data dominance: using user interactions to train the most predictive spatial AI on the market, becoming the standard interface through which the entire furniture sector will meet the consumer of the future.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©
