Startups

Cover, a modular home builder that’s modeled in ways after Tesla, has raised a $60 million Series B

Comment

Image Credits: Cover

There are lots of startups now working on modular home design. Among the most interesting is Cover, a seven-year-old, LA-based company that says it manufactures fully complete wall, floor and roof panels in its factory, then transports them on a standard truck and assembles them on site — without a crane.

The materials it is using are lightweight steel for the building frame and aluminum for the ceilings. The panels are made of a rubber composite because, as founder and CEO Alexis Xavier Rivas explains, “drywall is not designed for manufacturing or transport — it’s too brittle.”

Clearly, a lot of thought has been invested in how these buildings are designed. For example, the company installs all plumbing and electrical wiring in the ceiling, so that if an owner wants to run a new wire or pipe, she or he need only pop off the ceiling to do it.

It sounds strange, but it’s a lot less strange than sawing a series of holes in a wall, then patching them up and repainting them to achieve the same end. (It also requires less help from craftspeople like plumbers and electricians, who are in short supply right now.)

Other materials used include real wood and wood composites for the floors and exterior, and solid surface countertops and bathroom floors that are nonporous, meaning they’re more hygienic, as these things go, which matters increasingly to homeowners as the world emerges from a pandemic.

How the materials come together is naturally even more crucial, given that with Cover, much of the focus — and the promise — is on both quick assembly and customization.

According to Rivas, the process works as follows: A customer works with the company to create a design. Right now, that design is limited to single-story units that are 1,200-square-feet or smaller but which take into account factors such as where windows should be placed to minimize energy waste. (Rivas also notes here that the windows, made by Cover, are LEED-certified, and that its homes are airtight, vastly improving their energy efficiency.)

Cover then takes the agreed-upon design, at a price that’s established up front and includes permitting fees, city fees, foundation fees and the home itself — think $200,000 for 400-square-foot studio; $250,000 for a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom unit; and up to $500,000 for a 1,200-square-foot three-bedroom dwelling — and it gets to work engineering the pieces.

Somewhat amazingly, it says that after the foundation is complete, it can have the building built and installed within 30 days, down from the 120-window that it used to promise customers.

It also offers a 100% money-back guarantee if it can’t obtain the necessary permits, along with a lifetime structural warranty and a one-year warranty for everything else.

These buildings are “not going to rot,” says Rivas. “They aren’t going to be eaten by termites.” If a customer needs new air filters, on the other hand, “we’ll change them.”

Rivas, who grew up in Toronto, studied architecture in college and bounced briefly around a number of architectural firms before founding Cover, takes pride in being able to attract engineers from SpaceX and Tesla to the mission, and at various points during a conversation earlier this week, likened Cover’s processes to that of the automaker.

He’s seemingly not the only one who sees similarities. The company is today announcing that it has raised $60 million in Series B funding led by Gigafund, an investment firm that was founded by two former Founders Fund investors who have bet heavily on SpaceX.

Joining the round are Valor Equity Partners and Founders Fund — both of which are also early investors in SpaceX and Tesla — and a whole bunch of other notable backers, including General Catalyst, Lennar, Fifty Years, AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant, Lowercase Capital founder Chris Sacca, Marathon Asset Management CEO Bruce Richards and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, among others.

Certainly, there’s no dearth of demand for what Cover is building, given the national housing — and construction — shortage. In fact, asked about Cover’s sales team, Rivas says that there is so much inbound interest that just “one-third of one person’s time is in sales” right now.

As for what people are ordering, Rivas says that most of the company’s customers have bought dwellings to accommodate either family moving in (an aging parent, a kid coming back from college); to create a home office apart from their house; or to establish a way to drum up rental income.

Still, beyond the roughly 20 backyard homes it has already built, the company — which has now raised $75 million altogether — very much intends to begin building bigger, multilevel homes, as well as multifamily units.

It mostly boils down to using more panels, Rivas says, which the company will be able to produce from the 100,000-square-foot factory into which it’s moving from the 25,000-square-foot warehouse it operates currently. (That’s where some of that $60 million is headed.)

Indeed, he says, if all goes as planned, sometime soon, even existing customers will be able to easily enlarge the homes they’ve already bought using the Cover app. It’ll be a snap, by his telling.

“You’ll go on the app, you’ll click on the room to which you want to add, then schedule it, pay online, and get your renovation done in two to three days.”

It’s the kind of curtain raiser for which Elon Musk is known. Now to see if Cover can pull it off.

More TechCrunch

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

17 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

19 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android