Nemetschek’s daughter company and global BIM provider has acquired the popular mobile design application Morpholio. This new acquisition will bring Morpholio Trace, Board, and Journal into the Vectorworks ecosystem and supplement Vectorworks’s desktop, web (cloud), and existing mobile device solutions.
Morpholio Acquired
The award-winning Morpholio Trace came to the AEC market after the iPad became a hit new device for AEC professionals. Over the years, other tools emerged, including Morpholio Board and Morpholio Journal—all apps for Apple’s popular iPad and iPhone. The iPad is the dominant marketshare leader for tablet computers in the United States’ construction industry.
The news means architects, interior designers, and other creative professionals can extend the design-centric workflows of both companies’ solutions from the earliest ideation and sketching all the way through complex and sophisticated Open BIM workflows with documentation and delivery.
Morpholio is now part of Vectorworks Inc, after a strategic acquisition by the Nemetschek Group’s daughter company.
“We are thrilled to welcome Morpholio to the Vectorworks portfolio,” said Vectorworks CEO Jason Pletcher. “Morpholio shares our belief that software should enhance designers’ creativity, not hinder it. By combining Vectorworks’ CAD and BIM platform with Morpholio’s expertise in mobile sketching and presentation, we are strengthening our foundation and expanding what our tools can do together, so customers gain even more freedom, confidence, and creative control in their workflows.”
Joining Forces
The founders and team members of Morpholio, who are architects and designers with a strong passion for design and quality, will now join the Vectorworks team. With Vectorworks’ global resources, scale, and commitment to innovation, the Morpholio apps will now advance even more rapidly than before, serving both the needs of existing Morpholio customers and the strategic goals of the Vectorworks platform.
“This partnership allows us to put the best of mobile together with the best of desktop and create opportunities for designers to bring the unique magic of drawing to more parts of their process,” said Morpholio Co-Founder Mark Collins. “In the years ahead, we see an opportunity to support a richer design experience where sketches, markups, BIM, and AI work seamlessly together. That’s how we unlock new creative superpowers without losing the soul of design.”
The two companies see building on existing AI technologies in Vectorworks and leveraging that to bring additional AI-ready features to Morpholio Trace via sketching, moodboarding, and presentations.
The Power of Morpholio
Morpholio Trace is widely regarded as an all-in-one drawing and design app for architects and designers, offering “scale-aware” sketching, layers, markup, and presentation-ready imagery that pair naturally with Vectorworks models and drawings. The acquisition actually formalizes an existing relationship between the two companies, including work to advance connectivity between Morpholio apps and Vectorworks Cloud Services.
Morpholio Boards serves interior designers and stylists with powerful moodboarding, product curation, and presentation tools. Interior designers use it to deliver polished deliverables to their clients.
Morpholio Journal provides a flexible digital notebook and sketchbook, giving architects and designers a place to capture ideas, notes, and visuals.
“Over the past decade, the iPad and Apple Pencil have sparked a creative renaissance for architects and designers,” said Morpholio Co-Founder Anna Kenoff. “Morpholio was founded with the vision to help define that era. While that has been an incredible beginning, we’re now ready to lead the design industry into its next creative technology revolution.”
Going Forward
For existing Morpholio users, day-to-day use of the apps remains unchanged, and customers can continue to subscribe to Morpholio Trace, Board, and Journal through the Apple App Store. Vectorworks also plans to introduce new offerings designed for larger offices collaborating across devices in Morpholio Trace and Board in the future.
“As part of the Nemetschek Group, Vectorworks’ acquisition of Morpholio is an important step in our strategy to deliver intelligent, connected, open solutions for customers across AEC brands,” said Sunil Pandita, Chief Division Officer Planning & Design, and CEO of Allplan. “Over time, we see a strong potential to expand Morpholio’s mobile sketching and presentation capabilities available to designers working in a multitude of Nemetschek applications, so more of our customers can benefit from cognitive, richer, and cohesive workflows from concept through construction.”
“I believe strongly that joining forces is not an additive operation—it’s a multiplier,” said Morpholio Co-Founder Toru Hasegawa. “Vectorworks and Morpholio coming together is not simply a sum of capabilities, but the start of a multidimensional expansion of initiatives, reach, and long-term value.”
To learn more about Morpholio, go here or here for more on Vectorworks.
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
Morpholio was founded in 2011, a year after Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010. At that time, Architosh did a series of features focused on the revolutionary iPad because we instantly saw its potential for field work in AEC, including bringing construction drawings onto the job site as well as sketching and more. Morpholio’s founders, Mark Collins, Anna Kenoff, and Toru Hasegawa, were architects and clearly saw the same potential and more. Based in New York City (by the way, one of the strongest architectural markets for Vectorworks), Morpholio Trace was quickly recognized within the industry. We first wrote about it in 2013, including it on a list of drawing apps for the iPad.
Winning multiple awards and honors, and being featured in the New York Times, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Architectural Digest, among other publications, Morpholio Trace has evolved tremendously over the past decade and a half. Looking forward to the era of artificial intelligence, what is exciting about this pairing is that AI visualization tools are getting much better at staying closer to what architects are actually trying to envision, and are able to be fed hand sketches and stay quite close to the design intent in those hand sketches.
But where were those sketches taking place?
By and large, tools like Chaos’s Veras 4.0, which we just wrote about, and numerous other AI-powered visualization tools, including Vectorworks’s own AI Visualizer, can leverage hand sketches, but much sketching, if not the vast majority, takes place on actual trace paper. Morpholio Trace was always meant to be the digital equivalent of a roll of tracing paper. You can already sketch over 3D models (that can come into Morpholio Trace) for your 3d sketching, but now we can imagine the Nemetschek Group’s AI Visualizer rendering technology going to Morpholio Trace so that architects can deliver client-facing workflows that go from sketching to photo-realistic AI-powered visuals and animations. Moreover, its moodboards content can feed the AI engine.
