Alexey Sheremetyev, co-founder, Chief Product Officer, brings a relentless drive for innovation and a passion for convenient designing solutions to his role. Latest product ideas, business relations and customer happiness are key priorities for Alexey.
Planner 5D is a design platform that allows users of all experience levels to create professional-looking floorplans and layouts for homes, landscapes, and offices. Leveraging artificial intelligence, the tool allows users to experiment with various design elements and immediately generate detailed 2D plans, 3D renderings, and immersive virtual reality tours. AI features assist in layout suggestions, furniture placement, and elegance matching to streamline the design process. Along with the design tools, Planner 5D offers an Interior Design School to assist users develop and refine their skills in spatial planning and aesthetics.
What inspired you to start out Planner 5D back in 2011? Was there a particular gap you noticed in the house design market?
Back in 2010-2011, while renovating my first apartment, I discovered how stark the software gap was: on one side, expensive, engineer-grade CAD tools that demanded weeks of coaching; on the opposite, lightweight 2D drag-and-drop apps that felt more like digital mood boards than real design instruments. Neither option let a house owner sketch a floor plan, furnish it, and immediately ‘walk’ through the space in 3D.
So, I set myself a transparent goal for what became Planner 5D after I began prototyping in early 2011: make home design as playful as The Sims, yet accurate enough that a contractor could trust the scale.
How did your background in website design, UI/UX, and product management shape your vision for Planner 5D?
My UI/UX background hard-wired a vision of interfaces so intuitive they feel invisible – every tap, drag, and reveal should simply “click” with human instinct. Product-management experience layered on the discipline to link that delight to clear business outcomes, ensuring every feature earns its place by serving each the user and the market. Together, they let me slip into start-up mode with confidence: moving fast, wearing many hats, and at all times steering Planner 5D toward the sweet spot where beautiful experience meets sustainable growth.
However the principal thing is that I had the hardest customer possible: me. Planner 5D began as a tool I built for my very own renovation project, so I used to be literally the platform’s first user – and a brutally strict one. Every wobble within the snapping grid, every extra click, every millimeter of mis-aligned cabinetry showed up in my very own floor plan, so it needed to be fixed before anyone else ever saw it. In that sense, I “ordered” the product from myself, with a spec that read: make home design so intuitive and precise that I’d actually trust it to rework my apartment.
That private dogfooding fused my three disciplines into one north-star query: ‘Can an entire novice design a publish-ready room in under ten minutes without reading a manual?’
Dogfooding the product from day one set the bar uncomfortably high, nevertheless it also guaranteed that when Planner 5D went public, it already felt playful yet skilled – letting first-time users jump from idea to immersive walkthrough before their coffee cooled.
Are you able to share the story of the early days of Planner 5D — from idea to launch? What were a few of the biggest initial challenges?
We were excited and inspired to start out working on the project. We set two principal goals: (1) make it as easy to make use of as possible, and (2) make it cross-platform so people wouldn’t need extra plug-ins or specific devices.
We achieved the primary goal by drawing on my UI/UX background and putting all our effort into making it feel as intuitive as a game. For cross-platform support, we selected HTML5 as our primary technology, which let anyone open and use Planner 5D in any browser, on any device. Although we later migrated to native code for every platform, HTML5 was the right solution for a small team delivering a multiplatform product within the early stages back to 2011.
How has Planner 5D evolved since its first version? How central is AI today to the Planner 5D experience?
Once we launched the browser-only MVP in 2012 it was little greater than a 2D grid that might pop right into a basic 3D view and a furniture catalog we hand-modeled. From there the product kept widening its “any device, any skill level” promise: iPad app in 2013, cloud renders in 2014, full iPhone/Android/macOS coverage by 2015, then Windows plus the primary VR/AR walkthroughs in 2016.
The actual inflection point got here in 2017, after I spun up an internal AI R&D track. Two years later we shipped AI floor-plan recognition – upload a photograph or PDF and watch it turn into an editable 3D model. In 2022 LiDAR-powered Scan Room and AI Automated Furniture Arrangement arrived, letting a phone sweep your space and have the system auto-furnish it in seconds. Last yr we layered on a generative AI Room Designer that proposes complete layouts, color palettes, and material mixes from a single prompt.
Today AI is not any longer a feature – it’s the workflow’s backbone. From the moment a floor plan is recognized, machine-learning models suggest wall moves, traffic flow optimizations, and elegance presets. Computer vision keeps scale honest. And generative algorithms auto-stage photorealistic renders in minutes. Greater than half of recent projects now start with an AI wizard, and power users lean on predictive furnishing and fast re-coloring to iterate faster than manual tools ever allowed. Briefly, the unique vision – make design feel like play without sacrificing precision – has evolved right into a collaboration between the user’s creativity and an always-on AI co-designer.
Are you able to explain how AI technologies just like the Smart Wizard, Design Generator, and Floor Plan Recognition enhance the house design process for users?
The best profit is the time you save – and the burst of inspiration you get. You now not have to start out from scratch.
Smart Wizard and AI Designer bust blank-canvas anxiety, enforces ergonomic spacing, and acts as a “first draft” you refine as a substitute of ranging from scratch.
Floor plan recognition saves hours of tracing, preserves scale accuracy, and lets agents, remodelers, or latest homeowners jump straight to layout tweaks.
Design Generator sparks creativity, helps non-designers articulate aesthetic preferences, and accelerates iteration without manual recoloring or re-furnishing.
In other words, one click and – boom – you’ve already got plenty of fabric to refine and even use as-is.
How do you be certain that AI-generated designs still feel personalized and creatively unique for every user?
At Planner 5D, we imagine AI must be an extension of the user’s creativity – not a alternative for it. Our approach combines data-driven intelligence with human-centered design. During onboarding, we ask users for contextual information like their home address or kind of property, which allows us to counterpoint the experience with open-source data relevant to their environment – reminiscent of architectural style, climate, and even local materials.
We then leverage AI to supply design suggestions which might be deeply contextual and adaptive, but we at all times give the user the ultimate say. Whether it’s the layout or furniture style, users can tweak every element. So our AI becomes not only a mechanical tool, but an actual co-designer you wish to partner with.
How do you see Planner 5D helping not only homeowners, but in addition students, realtors, contractors, and skilled designers in the long run?
Planner 5D has at all times been about democratizing design – making it accessible, intuitive, and powerful for everybody, not only homeowners. While homeowners are our core audience, we’re seeing exciting traction in adjoining user groups, and we’re actively constructing out the platform to serve them higher.
Students – we now have a special offer for K-12 school districts! They’ll receive free Planner 5D educational licenses to make use of of their curriculum, implement special projects with students, support project-based learning (PBL), and more.
Realtors – we understand challenges and are actively working to deal with them in Planner 5D. For instance, we’ve just launched a strong latest feature on iOS – Home Scanner. With just an iPhone camera, you’ll be able to generate CAD and GLA blueprints, editable 3D floor plans, renders, 3D walkthroughs, and more. Simply walk around a property, and you will get helpful visual materials to reinforce your listings.
Skilled designers and contractors – not only get access to our well-known advanced features, but in addition powerful latest collaboration tools to enhance their work with clients. Planner 5D is evolving right into a full-scale platform – not only a 3D home design tool, but in addition a CRM that helps solve real business challenges.
Ultimately, our vision is to make Planner 5D the go-to ecosystem where all these personas can collaborate – each with their very own view, tools, and language – around a shared visual model of the space.
As each Founder and Chief Product Officer, how do you balance long-term vision with day-to-day product development priorities?
Balancing long-term vision with day by day execution is one among the toughest – but most significant – parts of my role. As a founder, I’m continuously enthusiastic about where the industry is headed in 5 to 10 years: how spatial computing, AI, and immersive experiences will redefine home design. But as Chief Product Officer, I also must be certain that our team is shipping value week by week and solving real problems for our users today.
The hot button is structured alignment. We operate with a robust product strategy framework that ties every thing we do back to our north star – making design easy, smart, and human. I work closely with our product managers, designers, and engineers to set quarterly OKRs that ladder as much as our long-term goals. That way, even the smallest UX improvement or infrastructure update is an element of an even bigger story.
I also make time every week to step out of the weeds. I confer with users, review data trends, and stay near emerging tech – this helps me calibrate whether our roadmap continues to be pointing in the fitting direction or if a course correction is required.
Ultimately, it’s about constructing a team and culture that may operate on each levels. I don’t have to choose from vision and execution – I just must make certain they’re in constant conversation.
What emerging technologies are you most enthusiastic about integrating into Planner 5D in the approaching years?
It’s tough to plan for years keeping in mind acceleration of the technologies today, but I’d mention couple of them:
Generative AI – Not only for creating design ideas, but for constructing a really conversational design assistant. Imagine a user saying, “Make this room feel more like a comfy Scandinavian cabin,” and the AI immediately adapts the space with appropriate textures, layouts, and lighting. We’re already experimenting with this, and the potential is very large.
Real-world data integration – We’re exploring ways to layer in every thing from climate analytics to buildings data. With access to a user’s real home data – layout, location, materials – our AI can offer tailored suggestions that truly make a difference in day by day life.
Where do you see Planner 5D five years from now, particularly on the planet of AI-driven design?
It’s hard to make long-term predictions – just a few years ago, we couldn’t have imagined how rapidly AI would evolve and speed up. And now we’re expecting much more powerful advancements that may unlock latest ways to assist individuals with home improvements. Our goal is to make the method increasingly seamless, moving beyond devices and delivering smooth, impactful results.
