AEC Design & Engineering Software
The buyer population — Architectural, engineering and related services
Base industry report for 5413 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 20,474
- Under 10 employeesA
- 75%
- Establishments · USA
- 117,056
- Employment · USA
- 1,663,011
- Payroll · USA
- $164.6B
Of 20,474 Canadian establishments with employees, 75% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators. Each of those is one potential account, before any filter for size or fit.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Displace an incumbent the screen found well defended — payments attached to the workflow, data that does not leave, a contract that renews itself. Share here means giving a buyer a reason to break something that currently works, which is a higher bar than being better.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — incumbent vulnerability
Autodesk's AECO line alone runs at $3.583B and grew 22%, Trimble's AECO segment adds $1.499B and Bentley carries $1.46B of ARR in infrastructure engineering, and the file formats are the lock — RVT and DGN are read properly only by their owners. An entrant does not compete on features but on interoperability it does not control. Note the sizing here is a floor of $5.1B from Autodesk's and Trimble's disclosed AECO revenue alone, not a market estimate.
The incumbent
Who owns this market and who is coming for it. Fields a screen never reached say so rather than guessing.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 3 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 3 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autodesk (AECO)NASDAQ: ADSKA | $3.6B | — | FY2026 (ended 2026-01-31), 10-K filed 2026-03-03 — AECO revenue from the revenue-recognition disaggregation note; Autodesk has one reportable segment, so this is an end-market split rather than segment revenue |
| Bentley SystemsNASDAQ: BSYA | $1.5B | — | ARR at 31 Dec 2025 — recurring, not GAAP revenue |
| Trimble (AECO)NASDAQ: TRMBA | $1.5B | — | FY2025 (52 weeks ended 2026-01-02), 10-K filed 2026-02-25 — AECO reportable segment revenue; group revenue $3.5873B — Trimble's AECO ('Architects, Engineers, Construction and Owners') has been a reportable segment since the fiscal-2024 reorganisation, which restated 2022-2023 out of the old Buildings and Infrastructure / Geospatial / Resources and Utilities / Transportation structure; 2022-2025 AECO is one comparable series, but it is not continuous with the pre-2024 Buildings and Infrastructure segment. The 10-K discloses ARR only at group level ($2.3923B), not by segment |
| Nemetschek GroupC | not disclosed | — | Not researched for this record |
Startups & challengers
Newer and smaller vendors going at the incumbent — funded challengers first. Named, not researched to the depth of the field above; a company with a page here links to it.
| Company | Stage | What it does | Raised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monograph | Startup | Project management and fee tracking for architecture and engineering firms | — |
Evidence
Evidence. Incumbent financials on this record ARE sourced (tier A/B, see the financials block). Both AECO citations were re-opened on EDGAR. Autodesk: FY2026 Form 10-K (ended 2026-01-31, filed 2026-03-03) — AECO $3,583M vs $2,937M, total $7,206M; the record's earlier '53% of total' was wrong and is corrected to 49.7%, and 'AECO segment' is relabelled because the segment note states one reportable segment. Trimble: FY2025 Form 10-K (52 weeks ended 2026-01-02, filed 2026-02-25) — AECO segment revenue $1,498.6M vs $1,358.6M. The record's previous 'Trimble AECO ARR $1.577B' could not be found anywhere in that 10-K, which discloses ARR only at group level, so it has been replaced by the GAAP segment figure rather than carried forward. Bentley's ARR line was not in scope here and was not re-opened. The cut factor and reasoning remain analyst judgment and were not tested against customers.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Canada's BIM/digital-construction industry body; canbim.com now redirects here; organization, professional and student membership
Canadian chapter of buildingSMART (openBIM/IFC standards); individual and organization members
National architects' body; runs RAIC Connects, a members-only virtual community; no member count on site
Consulting engineering firms, the engineering-side buyers; no member count on site
US BIM industry forum (AGC-affiliated); publishes the Level of Development spec; no member count on site
UK-based trade title on BIM, CAD and AEC software; runs the NXT BLD event
Autodesk's annual Design & Make conference; Sept 15-17, 2026, The Venetian, Las Vegas
Free-membership Autodesk user group with per-product forums (forums.augi.com) and AUGIWorld magazine; blocked automated access
The Autodesk Revit forums and RevitForum.org block automated access; dbei.org (BILT conference) did not respond. r/Revit could not be verified from this network.
The businesses it sells to
Operating-business records filed along the same branch of NAICS — the customers of this software, screened as businesses in their own right.
No operating-business record has been written along this branch yet. The base industry report says what the subsector typically runs on.