From Practice to Product: A Fireside Chat with the illoca Founders
Chin-Yi Cheng and Chiaowei Yu on design, AI, and building tools for the people who use them.
To close out the year, we’re sitting down with illoca’s cofounders for a small, open conversation with our Shapers, students, and educators. It’s our thank-you to everyone who built with us this year, and a chance to ask the founders anything.
Chin-Yi came to illoca from AI research for design. Chiaowei came from running BIM and VDC teams on large buildings. Between them, they’ve seen how design tools get made and how they get used on real projects.
What we’ll talk about
How Chin-Yi and Chiaowei went from architecture practice and AI research to starting a company
What changes when AI enters how buildings and products get designed, and what doesn’t
How illoca decides what to build for designers, and what’s coming next
Your questions, sent ahead or asked live
Who it’s for
Design leaders and practitioners curious about where their tools are going, educators rethinking how design is taught, and students working out their path.
About the speakers
Chin-Yi Cheng, CEO and Co-founder, illoca
Chin-Yi trained in architecture and computer science at MIT. He led generative AI research for design at Autodesk AI Lab and later worked at Google DeepMind. His research includes House-GAN, Building-GAN, and CLIP-Forge.
Chiaowei Yu, COO and Co-founder, illoca
Chiaowei led the VDC team at Mazzetti, where she became the youngest director in the firm’s history. She then built and led the BIM team at Tesla, delivering large-scale manufacturing and R&D facilities.
About illoca
illoca builds AI-native design tools for architects, engineers, and designers. Plamo, our agentic 3D modeling tool, turns sketches, photos, drawings, and text into editable 3D geometry you can keep refining and export to Rhino, Grasshopper, SketchUp, CAD formats, and more. You design. Plamo models.