Tests a new office layout against real attendance before the fit-out starts
TL;DR Dryplan replays a firm's own attendance and meeting data through a draft floor plan before anyone builds it. It shows on which days desks run short, which meeting rooms are too big or too few, and where teams end up split across floors. Design-and-build firms and occupiers pay per project, at the drawing stage.
Office layouts in India are still drawn from rules of thumb, like a desk-sharing ratio or a room per so many seats. Executives report high utilisation, with 55% of firms in one big consultancy's survey saying their offices run above 75%[1], but those figures come from surveys, not measurement. Hybrid patterns make the old ratios unreliable, because Tuesday and Friday look nothing alike.
Mistakes are expensive and slow to reverse. Prime Bengaluru rent is ₹163 per sq ft a month[2], so a layout that wastes even 5% of a large floor costs lakhs a month.
Wrong meeting-room mixes are worse. Staff hunt for small rooms while ten-seat boardrooms hold two people, and once glass walls and cabling are in, fixing that is a second fit-out.
Dryplan takes two inputs - the draft layout from the designer (CAD export or a marked-up PDF) and 8–12 weeks of the client's badge, booking and calendar metadata, aggregated by team. It then runs simulated weeks where people arrive by team pattern, look for desks near their team and book rooms of the size their meetings need, and the model counts every failure.
The output is a short report with heatmaps showing peak-day desk shortfall by zone, room mix against real meeting sizes, and teams that would be split across floors. Designers change the plan and run it again in minutes, so the client sees two or three options compared on the same data.
Machine learning shows up in one narrow place, which is forecasting attendance patterns forward for planned headcount growth. The rest is plain simulation, and the report says which is which. I like that honesty, personally.
Design-and-build firms and project managers pay per project and resell the report as part of their design fee. Large occupiers can buy directly too. My estimate is ₹2–6 L per project depending on floor area, since no Indian price was found. For context, occupancy software abroad costs about ₹240 (US$2.50) per desk a month at one US vendor[3].
73% of occupiers in one big consultancy's survey plan to make workplace design a key focus, and 72% expect to grow their portfolio by 10% or more in two years[1]. India leased a record 82.6 million sq ft in 2025[4], and each new or renewed lease means a layout drawn for a hybrid week the old ratios never assumed.
There is no public figure for spending on layout simulation in India. The narrow signal is project volume - 82.6 million sq ft of leasing in 2025[4], most of which needs a fit-out design.
The growing share of GCC demand, about 39% of leasing in Q4 2025[4], matters because these firms already hold badge and calendar data in usable form.
Global workplace platforms offer scenario modelling and stack and move planning in its workplace platform[5], but it starts from live operations, not a design under review. One US tool generates site plans with AI for developers, and its listed building types don't include office interiors[6]. Brokers and design firms in India run space programming in spreadsheets. The gap is a pre-build test, sold through the people who draw the plans.
| Difficulty | Moderate (37/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹55–95 L |
| Time to launch | 6–9 months |
Reading floor plans from all sorts of CAD files is fiddly. The harder part is making the simulation believable, because designers and clients need to see their own weeks reflected or they'll dismiss the result. Getting data out of client IT inside a design schedule is the third headache.
No sector licence applies to simulation or reporting. Layout changes stay with the licensed designer.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't trust AI forecasts for firms with little history or a big policy change ahead. Show ranges, and let the designer decide.
Want to work out the AI layer for Dryplan? Talk to Yash →
I'd back a founder with workplace design or computational design experience who can talk to architects as a peer. If you have no design-industry contacts then this will be an uphill climb. Prove one thing first - that two design-and-build firms will pay for a report on a live project, and that it actually changes the drawings.
Plan for roughly ₹55–95 L, mostly for engineers, data integrations and the first design-firm pilots. Partnering with one design firm early keeps sales costs lower.
No sector licence. You need company registration, GST and DPDP compliance for employee attendance data.
Yes, fit-outs happen everywhere. Check local data protection law before taking badge and calendar data.
The free Dryplan validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for designers and occupiers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Dryplan or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting design firms to resell the report rather than see it as a rival, and I'm happy to help you figure out that pitch. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.