Most homeowners actually still plan renovations the way our grandparents did. There’s a tape measure involved, some scratch paper, a lot of guessing about whether a queen bed will fit, and pretty much zero chance the contractor sees the same picture you do. Planner 5D has spent roughly 15 years quietly fixing that, and the company just picked up a 2026 AI Excellence Award for the way it’s using a phone camera to do work that, honestly, used to require LIDAR rigs and a small army of professionals.
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Alexey, who co-founded the company and now serves as Chief Product Officer, basically built the original tool to solve his own problem. He had just bought an apartment, he had a tight budget, and like most homeowners he wanted to share renovation ideas with contractors and family without drawing on napkins. Today, that little side project is used by more than 100 million people, with around 5,000 home scans flowing in every month. So that journey, from one frustrated apartment owner to a global software platform, is the story of why this category exists at all.
Why Old-School Room Planning Was Broken
Anyone who has ever tried to renovate a room can pretty much tell you the pain points. Measurements are nearly always off. Sketches don’t survive the trip from your kitchen table to a contractor’s truck. And nobody actually agrees on what the finished space should look like until somebody puts a couch in the wrong spot. According to a recent Houzz & Home Study, U.S. homeowners spent a median of $24,000 on home improvements in 2023, with kitchens and primary bathrooms leading the list. That’s a lot of money basically riding on a hand-drawn floor plan.
Honestly, the gap between intention and decision-making was just too long. People had to imagine the renovation in their head, hire someone to render a static image, then start a slow back-and-forth with builders. Each round added cost. Each round added time. So most folks just gave up on the dream and went with whatever the contractor suggested.
Spatial AI for Home Design Closes the Gap
What Alexey and his team built kind of flips that whole sequence. Instead of starting with a blueprint, you start with your phone. You walk through a room, you film it more or less the way you’d film a quick clip for a friend, and the system returns an editable 3D plan complete with the right colors, textures, flooring, and measurements. Spatial AI for home design is the technical phrase, but in practice it just feels like the room jumped onto your screen.
The accuracy piece is really where things get interesting. Early on, the team needed devices with built-in LIDAR sensors. Today, lidar or no lidar, the computer vision pipeline handles the math on the server side. Gartner has predicted that by 2026, 75% of enterprises will have shifted from piloting to operationalizing AI, and consumer-grade tools like this one are basically a similar shift on the residential side. So the magic is just less about the hardware and more about the trained model behind it.
The Digital Twin Is Really the Whole Point
Russ likes to call it a filing cabinet for your home, and that’s actually a pretty fair description. A digital twin in this context isn’t just a render. It’s a persistent record of every wall, appliance, fixture, lamp, and SKU inside a property. It can hold your insurance documents, your contractor history, your mortgage paperwork, and the receipt from that tile guy you used a decade ago. So when you ask the app a question, it actually has the context to answer.
Alexey believes the long-term relationship will basically be between Planner 5D and the houses themselves rather than between Planner 5D and the people. People move out. Houses don’t. The next homeowner shouldn’t have to start from scratch, in his view, because the legacy of every prior renovation should just travel with the property. According to McKinsey research on construction technology, the built-environment sector has historically lagged in digitalization, so a persistent home record could really move the needle on resale value, insurance pricing, and maintenance planning.
Why Pros Quietly Make This a Daily Tool
Consumers often try the app once for a single project. Pros, on the other hand, kind of live in it. Real estate agents typically walk through a property, scan it in a few minutes, and hand the digital twin to a buyer before they leave the driveway. Builders use it as a pre-sales tool, basically presenting clients with multiple design options on the same floor plan. Interior designers tap into the editable layer so the homeowner can move a sofa around in real time without booking another meeting.
That co-creation model is more or less the secret sauce. Most competing tools stop at a static measurement or a fixed render. Planner 5D started with an editable 3D home editor and then built verticals on top of it. So when a homeowner says "I love it but move the kitchen island a foot to the left," the platform just lets them do it without restarting the whole process. NAR’s 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that 100% of buyers used the internet during their search, with photos and detailed property information being among the most useful features. Editable 3D models are basically the next step in that progression.
Training the Model on 130 Million Users
The really practical advantage Planner 5D has is just sheer data. The company has roughly 130 million users today, with a massive library of floor plans, designs, and finished spaces. That’s the training set. So when a new user scans a room with bad lighting and a couch in the way, the AI has actually seen something pretty similar before, often a lot of times.
There’s also a human in the loop for quality control, of course. Users can correct minor dimensions themselves through a tap-and-pull interface. Bigger issues just trigger a feedback channel where the team can ask for additional pictures or video. A built-in five-star rating system feeds the inner evaluation engine, so the model is basically learning from every single scan. That’s really how a small team can handle 5,000 monthly scans without quality drifting.
Where This All Goes Next
Looking ahead, Alexey sees Planner 5D evolving into the home screen of the home itself, basically a single place where appliances, documentation, valuations, and renovation history all live together. The company is already experimenting with integrations into HVAC, lighting, and other smart-home systems. AI agents can now recognize a device from a photo without needing a formal API integration, which actually changes the engineering math for connecting all those disparate systems.
There’s also a valuation play. By comparing your home to neighborhood comps, the platform can recommend specific upgrades that just push your property value higher and even surface contractors and permitting steps to get there. So at the end of the day, this isn’t really a renovation app anymore. It’s slowly becoming an operating layer for the most expensive asset most of us will ever own.
The 2026 AI Excellence Award basically recognizes companies that are using AI to solve real-world problems with measurable impact. Planner 5D fits that pretty squarely. The team took 15 years of patient product work, layered modern computer vision on top, and built something that actually changes how 130 million people interact with their own homes.
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