We are excited to share Building Ventures’ investment in Mosaic. Founded by Salman Ahmad and Sep Kamvar, Mosaic is a full-stack construction technology company. The company develops technologies that make construction more efficient and uses them to deliver best-in-class construction services at scale.
We are excited about Mosaic for a host of reasons. First, the company has amassed a terrific team of expertise from software, real estate, and construction including Yonatan Cohen, Head of Architecture and Design (former research designer at MIT and award-winning architect ); Ron Gonski, Head of Business Operations and General Counsel (former systems engineer at Honeywell and real estate corporate attorney at Fennemore Craig); Max Leiserson, Head of Engineering (former assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Microsoft Research); and Ed Walters, Head of Business Development (former venture capital and real estate investor at Morningside Group and Tamarisc Ventures). Founders Salman and Sep have a unique and symbiotic relationship that dates back to their time together at Stanford and MIT, where Salman and Sep were research collaborators and Salman was Sep’s PhD student.
Second, we’d be hard pressed to find a company with a more aligned mission to our own. Our belief in utilizing technology to industrialize the construction process to build better, more sustainable, more delightful buildings is made manifest in Mosaic’s technology, products and vision. One of our core investment themes is the need for dramatically increased efficiency and productivity in the construction process, embodied in our focus on “Constructuring.. A key tenant of Constructuring is the idea that construction must adopt the predictable repeatable processes embodied in modern manufacturing. This idea has been somewhat embraced in the homebuilding and multi-family space, but unfortunately the standardization has resulted in a monoculture of indistinguishable tract homes and low rise apartment buildings. The problem is the industry has taken the “standardized product” approach rather than the much more appealing “mass customization” approach Mosaic is taking.
Using the architecture and infrastructure of the internet as a model, Mosaic is “scripting and automating the coordination infrastructure.” Mosaic has developed a new programming system in which they script and automate the coordination of every step of the construction process. This has four important benefits: Reduced Time, Increased Productivity, Less Overhead, Greater Scalability. The result of this approach is they do not need to standardize the product, allowing them to build a neighborhood of diverse homes at the same cost as it would cost to build a monoculture.
We are thrilled to participate in Mosaic’s Series A led by a16z and join Mosaic’s existing investor group, including: Greylock Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Slow Ventures, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, SV Angel and 8VC. Mosaic is initially targeting the new residential homebuilding market, specifically the development of large scale (50+ home) communities, and the company will use these funds to execute the construction of their initial neighborhood contracts in Arizona.
Read more about Salman, Sep and the Mosaic Team’s inspiring mission here.
