Mighty Buildings, a startup building tech for prefabricated, ostensibly environmentally-friendly homes, today announced that it raised $52 million in a funding round co-led by Waed Ventures and Bold Capital with participation by Khosla Ventures.
The new tranche, which sources familiar with the matter say values the startup at between $300 million and $350 million, brings Mighty Buildings’ total raised to $150 million. CEO Scott Gebicke says that it’ll be put toward Mighty Buildings’ expansion in North America and the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, and supporting the launch of the company’s next-gen modular homebuilding kit. prefabricated tiny house
“The pandemic aggravated the housing shortage in the U.S. and other countries, as projects needed to be paused and construction workers permanently left the industry,” Gebicke told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Recent interest rate increases, which were expected to cool housing demand, have had the opposite effect, as the secondary market for used houses plummeted, driving ever more demand for newly built homes.”
Mighty Buildings was founded in 2017 by Slava Solonitsyn, Dmitry Starodubtsev, Sam Ruben and Alexey Dubov, who sought to create a platform leveraging 3D printing to help automate the construction industry, specifically the home construction industry. Gebicke, a former naval officer and previously a project lead in McKinsey’s industrial practice, was appointed CEO last December.
3D-printed, prefab homes may sound out of the ordinary. But they’ve become more common as fluctuating construction materials and labor costs push property developers to seek affordable alternatives to traditional home building.
The U.S. is short 650,000 construction workers, according to the trade association Associated Builders and Contractors. And 82.5% of materials — including electrical conduit, steel and concrete — have experienced “significant” cost increases since 2020, per a report in Oxford Economics.
3D-printed homes promise to be comparatively cheap — and easy to assemble. A 2018 study in the academic journal IOP Science: Materials Science and Engineerings argues that 3D printing can cut costs by at least 35%. And according to industry experts, it takes as little as a month to piece together an entire 3D-printed home — far shorter a time frame than the six to eight months spent constructing a typical house.
Charitable organizations including Habitat for Humanity have begun to print homes for families, and neighborhoods of 3D-printed homes — albeit quite small ones — have begun to spring up.
“We typically compete against traditional building methodologies, such as stick-built single family homes in the U.S. and concrete precast in the Middle East,” Gebicke said. “In most developed and developing nations in the world, the industry must build more homes much faster in order to address the supply shortages.”
Mighty Buildings provides a prefabricated kit of parts to developers, who use its product to build residential structures. Initially, San Francisco-based Mighty Buildings sold prefab homes directly to customers. But within the past two years, the startup has shifted to selling whole communities of homes to developers.
The company claims its proprietary printed material, made of 60% recycled glass, is five times the strength of concrete, 70% the weight and produces fewer carbon emissions during manufacturing. It’s also rated for winds up to 150 miles per hour — hurricane-force, in other words — and compliant with the California Building Code, including Title 24 Energy requirements and other regulatory standards.
Mighty Buildings employs ultraviolet light to cure its material off-site. This allows for “highly refined” and “unique” shapes with a range of customization options, the startup says, while reducing waste as only the material that’s required is cured.
“Our factory-based advanced manufacturing techniques deliver automotive grade quality control,” Gebicke said. “Moreover, our microfactories can be commissioned rapidly with relatively low capital expenditure, enabling production at scale.”
Of course, Mighty Buildings’ prefab homes aren’t for everyone. Given the newness of the tech, few home professionals — think electricians, plumbers and so on — are likely to be familiar with the nuances of a 3D-printed home in the event something goes wrong. And while platforms like Mighty Buildings’ allow for some customization, the printing-based manufacturing process limits the homes to certain designs.
But as the housing shortage grows, so does the 3D-printed construction market. Straits Research estimates that it’ll be worth $47.95 million in 2030.
Mighty Buildings is seeing its own customer base tick up, with revenue reaching around $5 million in 2022, according to Gebicke. He claims that the startup has a pipeline of projects in the U.S., Caribbean and Middle East that could be worth in the “hundreds of millions” within the next few years.
The competition’s stiff. Mighty Buildings competes with a number of players in the burgeoning 3D-printed construction sector, including Icon, Peri 3D, CyBe, Alquist 3D, Printed Farms and Nidus 3D. But Gebicke asserts that Mighty Buildings is making moves from a position of strength.
“We’re now working with some of the largest developers in the U.S. and in the Middle East to build very large numbers of homes very quickly and scalably in order to address the global housing shortage,” Gebicke added.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
There has been a silly amount of drama in the run-up to Tesla‘s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. The company is set to hold a vote on “re-ratifying” the $56…
To give users more control over the contacts an app can and cannot access, the permissions screen has two stages.
The push to produce a robotic intelligence that can fully leverage the wide breadth of movements opened up by bipedal humanoid design has been a key topic for researchers.
A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this team up to around 300 employees over the last year.
The most critical systems of our modern world rely on GPS, from aviation and road networks to emergency and disaster response, from precision farming and power grids to weather forecasting…
Since fintech startup Brex’s inception in 2017, its two co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi have run the company as co-CEOs. But starting today, the pair told TechCrunch in an…
Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Apple stole the spotlight. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence,…
India’s largest wealth manager focused on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, 360 One WAM, has agreed to acquire popular Indian mutual fund investment app ET Money for about $44 million. Earlier called IIFL…
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is worried Congress might react in a “knee-jerk” way where…
Layoffs are tough. This year alone, we’ve already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies according to layoffs.fyi. Looking for ways to grow your network can be even harder during…
YouTube announced this week the rollout of “Thumbnail Test & Compare,” a new tool for creators to see which thumbnail performs the best. The feature first launched to select creators…
Waymo has voluntarily issued a software recall to all 672 of its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole. This is Waymo’s second recall. The…
The hotel guest management technology company’s platform digitizes the hotel guest journey from post-booking through checkout.
The TechCrunch team runs down all of the biggest news from the Apple WWDC 2024 keynote in an easy-to-skim digest.
InScope leverages machine learning and large language models to provide financial reporting and auditing processes for mid-market and enterprises.
Venture fundraising has been a slog over the last few years, even for firms with a strong track record. That’s Foresite Capital’s experience. Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and…
A year ago, Databricks acquired MosaicML for $1.3 billion. Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become integral to Databricks’ AI solutions. Today, at the company’s Data + AI…
RetailReady targets the $40 billion compliance market to help reduce the number of retail compliance losses that shippers incur annually due to incorrectly shipped packages.
Since its launch in 2013, Databricks has relied on its ecosystem of partners, such as Fivetran, Rudderstack, and dbt, to provide tools for data preparation and loading. But now, at…
A big shoutout to the early-stage founders who missed the application window for the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) at TechCrunch Disrupt. We have exciting news just for you! You…
When one of the co-creators of the popular open source stream-processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it’s worth paying attention. Stephan Ewen was among the founding team of…
With most residential solar panels installed by smaller companies, customer experience can be a mixed bag. To try to address the quality and consistency problem, Civic Renewables is buying small…
Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support and long-term commitment among the partners — a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic. Colin Anderson (Palantir’s ex-CFO and…
Fisker is issuing the first recall for its all-electric Ocean SUV because of problems with the warning lights, according to new information published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…
Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led…
South Korea’s fabless AI chip industry saw a slew of fundraising events over the last couple of years as demand for hardware to power AI applications skyrocketed, and it seems…
Here’s a list of third-party apps that were Sherlocked by Apple at this year’s WWDC.
Black Semiconductor, which is developing a chip-connecting technology based on graphene, has raised $273M in a combination of private and public funding.
It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth…
house modular Fresh off the success of its first mission, satellite manufacturer Apex has closed $95 million in new capital to scale its operations. The Los Angeles-based startup successfully launched and commissioned…