Israeli construction tech unicorn hopes to transform home building
What if you could buy a new home designed to your specification, ready to live in within a quarter of the time it normally takes to build a new house, while leaving just half the carbon footprint of other construction?
As Americans strain under the weight of a housing shortage, an Israeli-founded and led company in San Mateo, California, Veev, is promising to do just that, remaking pre-fabricated construction by innovating new ways to put homes together quicker, greener and more efficiently than many other types of building methods.
One of very few unicorns operating in the construction technology space, Veev started out in 2008 as just another real estate asset manager. It pivoted about five years ago, changing its name from the Dragonfly Group along the way. Today, it is building a number of high-end projects in northern California, looking to begin scaling up to larger projects in the southern part of the Golden State as well as Texas. The company pulled in a $400 million investment in March to expand its operations in the US and bolster its 100-strong R&D team in Tel Aviv.
While the materials used to build homes have changed over time, many other aspects of the construction process have remained the same for hundreds of years. The deeply fragmented process involves bringing in at least a dozen subcontractors and around 200 laborers on a typical job, to each deal with a different aspect of the home, from excavation to carpentry, from lighting to landscaping. Every trade has its own building materials and schedules. In a best-case scenario, each is concerned with delivering top-notch work for their jigsaw piece but doesn’t look at the project as a whole.
