RayCAD ✓

RayCAD is a Revit plugin that automates the tagging of HVAC and piping drawings, built by XRay Labs Inc. and backed by gradCapital, an early-stage investor the company names directly on its own about page -- a pre-seed round the company announced publicly rather than keeping quiet about its funding stage.

The company is built by two brothers: Mohit Panchal, a senior undergraduate at IIT Gandhinagar who took a break from his computer-science studies to build RayCAD full time, and Poojan Panchal, who left a four-year run as an SDE 2 at Amazon to co-found the company -- a founding story the company tells plainly on its about page rather than dressing up with vaguer titles.

The core workflow targets a specific, well-understood MEP drafting pain point: tagging every duct, pipe, fitting, air terminal and piece of equipment in a Revit view by hand, run by run, sheet by sheet. RayCAD reads the model through the Revit API, applies a firm's own configured rules for where a tag belongs and which tag family to use, and places every tag in a view in one run -- without generating any tag text itself, since each tag still reads its values directly from the model element it's attached to, which the company argues means a tag placed by RayCAD can't come out factually wrong the way a hand-typed one occasionally does.

A second tool, Connect Conduits, extends the same automation into 3D routing -- modeling the elbows and straight runs between two conduits across different offsets and axes while respecting minimum bend radius -- and a third, broader tool called Harness (described as a generic way to bring AI models into Revit and other AEC software) is listed as coming soon, suggesting the company's ambitions extend beyond tagging specifically over time.

RayCAD runs entirely on the user's own machine rather than sending model data to external servers -- the company states plainly that models, views and families never reach its servers, that the plugin touches nothing but its own tags (not the model, other tags, or any parameters), that a failed run rolls back automatically, and that a whole tagging run is a single step in Revit's own undo history, addressing several of the specific, well-known reasons firms have historically been wary of installing third-party Revit plugins.

The company works closely with Orbit Engineering Services, an Australian HVAC detailing firm with Sydney Metro among its past projects, whose director Vipul Panchal is quoted stating RayCAD cut the firm's tagging time by over 70%, letting it take on roughly 1.5x more projects with the same team; a second named reviewer, Soumyajit Das, director at India's Bimtrack Engineering Pvt Ltd, is quoted describing tagging now taking about a third of the time it used to. Pricing is a single flat rate rather than per-seat licensing: a 15-day free trial with every feature and no usage cap, then $200 per month for the entire firm, covering all tools, unlimited licenses and unlimited usage, with the company noting this early "founding price" has a limited number of spots remaining.

Editor’s takeBIM•STACK editor's take: RayCAD's genuine strength is how narrowly and completely it solves one specific, tedious MEP drafting task -- automated, rule-based tag placement that reads a firm's own tag families rather than generating text, so output can't drift from what the model actually says -- paired with a refreshingly transparent founding story and a flat, firm-wide price that undercuts the usual per-seat SaaS model for this kind of plugin. The tagging scope is deliberately narrow (HVAC and piping today, with electrical and fire protection still coming), so firms whose immediate need spans more trades should factor that roadmap timing into the decision, but for MEP-heavy firms drowning in manual tag placement specifically, the combination of a real, quantified case study and a genuinely low-risk trial makes this an easy one to test firsthand.

RayCAD's setup is a one-time configuration step: a firm maps its own element families to its own tag families, and sets rules for where a tag belongs, how often one repeats along a run, and the shortest run length worth tagging -- once that configuration exists, every future run reuses it automatically, so the ongoing per-run workflow is select a view, run it, and review the result.

Because RayCAD sits in its own tab on Revit's existing ribbon rather than opening a separate application, drafters already fluent in Revit generally find the day-to-day operation (select view, configure or reuse a preset, run, review) quick to pick up without a lengthy formal training process.

The genuinely free, full-featured 15-day trial is designed specifically to let a firm test the configuration and results against its own real drawing sets before committing, which is the most direct way to gauge the actual learning curve and time savings for a specific firm's drafting standard rather than relying on vendor-reported figures alone.