- Construction tech start-up raised a $14.25 million Series A round led by Silicon Valley heavyweights a16z, and signed a deal to build 400 more homes in Arizona.
- The company uses software to create step-by-step building instructions out of home plans in an attempt to speed up the building process.
- CEO Salman Ahmad walked Business Insider through the pitch deck that helped the company raise its most recent round.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Construction tech startup Mosaic, which looks to make building homes cheaper and more efficient, has raised a $14.25 million Series A round led by Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz, it announced Wednesday.
The company is also expanding its partnership with Arizona builder Mandalay Homes to build 400 homes over the next two years. Mosaic and Mandalay have built almost 70 homes together in Arizona since 2018.
The company creates software that analyzes a home’s building plans and then breaks them down into concrete steps for each individual worker and trade that works on the home. It aims to reduce costly, time-consuming mistakes in the field, and to reduce waste of materials like lumber, while also allowing Mosaic’s software to continue to analyze the building process, applying computer learning to the physical world.
CEO Salman Ahmad told Business Insider that the company is a combination of his family history with construction —Ahmad’s dad is a contractor — and his academic interest in software and its application to the real world. While studying for a computer science masters at Stanford and a PhD at MIT, he noticed a crucial similarity between computer science and construction.
“At the end of the day, both of them are orchestrating a process that relies on physical hardware components,” Ahmad told Business Insider.
Where construction sites use tools from hammers to bulldozers, computers use chips and hard drives. One crucial difference between the two: computers can create huge productivity boosts because of their ability to continue iterating on previous software, while construction of individual, non-modular or repeated buildings is almost impossible to iterate on.
This may explain help explain why construction productivity has remained flat over the last 50 years while computers have revolutionized so many other industries. Mosaic’s software hopes to bring computer-science like iteration to the construction process, making the process of construction itself both cheaper and faster.
The company’s long-term goal is to become a tech service that home builders can use to streamline their processes without changing the underlying basics of how homes are built, but right now, Mosaic has its own employees building homes on the ground. Ahmad said that their on-site team acts as the firm’s research and development arm, testing out the efficacy of its software and new features in development. As demand grows, the on-site team will remain, but the company will mostly scale by selling its software to more builders.
Read more:Construction’s digital transformation is speeding up. Here are 10 contech startups to watch.
Unlike other construction tech companies, which are more focused on solving individual issues with financing or material sourcing, Mosaic is trying to actually make the process of building an individual home, on-site, more efficient.
Mosaic, launched in 2015, has now raised $24.7 million. Previous investors include Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Michael Milstein of Milstein Properties, Greylock Partners, and Eric Wu, the CEO of OpenDoor, among others.
Marc Andreessen, general partner at a16z and founder of the similarly named Mosaic browser, wrote an essay in June of this year, “It’s Time to Build,” that now seems to have previewed his firm’s investment. The essay blamed America’s comparatively bad coronavirus response on its inability to build and produce things within the country. He highlighted housing and education as two main areas of focus.
Ahmad walked us through the pitch deck that helped Mosaic snag its latest round of funding from one of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms.
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