San Mateo-based modular home building business Veev Group Inc. bags $400 million Series D led by BOND. LenX, Zeev Ventures and Fifth Wall also participated in the round, bringing Veev’s total funding to date to $600 million.
The real estate startup that in October 2020 completed a 78-unit emergency housing development in San Jose in just 90 days says it will use the capital to scale its operations, hasten its research and development and increase construction into new markets.
As old-style homebuilding methods struggle to solve America’s housing inventory crisis, Veev uses a new turnkey, panelized approach to expedite production, improve sustainability and decrease the cost of building a home.
“Veev will fundamentally change the way we build and experience homes in this country,” Noah Knauf, general partner at San Francisco-based Bond, said in Tuesday’s funding announcement. “From software-defined manufacturing to in-house supply chains, Veev is leading the industry with new technological construction practices of unprecedented quality and sustainability.”
New age versatile construction system
Veev’s walls are adaptable to build anything from a single-story accessory dwelling unit to an eight-story apartment building, Haller said. The pre-inspected walls can be made to order and snapped together on-site.
The company achieves this through a turnkey panelized approach, providing pre-inspected, fully cladded walls directly to building sites for installation. These walls also come with mechanical, electrical and plumbing components already included and use a plug-and-play system to reduce the need for skilled labor.
Through this building process, Veev says it can build homes up to four times faster than standard construction industry standards, which can bring down costs significantly. It says, “radical innovation is necessary across the entire value chain, from materials to methods, to partnerships,” considering the 7 million unit housing supply deficit estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Veev reimagined the entire homebuilding process by thinking about the home-as-a-product – the ultimate consumer product,” stated Amit Haller, Veev CEO and co-founder.
“By rethinking every element of the home, including design, materials, and the built environment, and fully integrating the homebuilding process from start to finish, we have managed to produce homes at a quality, speed, value, and sustainability that is unseen in the industry – until now,” Haller said.
Sustainable and ecofriendly homes
The company claims that its materials are sustainable and have 47 percent less CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) than traditional home construction. It states its Light Gauge Steel (LGS) framing and High-Performance Surface (HPS) materials are lighter, stronger and more sustainable than wood and drywall. The company plans to further reduce its carbon footprint by 25 percent in 2022.
The company heavily leans on artificial intelligence, using software to automate 70 percent of its building design across the mechanical, engineering and plumbing functions, reducing errors, improving speed, and opening up teams to develop all-inclusive blueprints faster.
While more robust, more sustainable materials give Veev a leg up on traditional building methods, the company says bringing the entire homebuilding process in-house enables it to sidestep the fragmented, volatile nature of the conventional construction process.
“We have rethought every element of the home and every step of the home building process to produce homes at a quality, speed, value and sustainability that nobody has achieved until now. We can build a home up to four times faster than can be done using conventional construction methods,” said Haller.
