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Tesla is launching version three of its solar roof tile this week

Published October 23, 2019

Tesla will debut a new, third iteration of its solar roof tile this week — with an official debut tomorrow afternoon. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday that it’ll make an official announcement detailing the differences in generation three on Thursday afternoon.

Tesla originally unveiled its solar roof tile product back in 2016, and officially opened pre-orders in 2017. During the company’s annual shareholder meeting in June, Musk said that the product was already in its third iteration, which he said improved performance and put the product on cost parity with cheap, non-solar roofing tiles, once you factor in savings over time on utility cost plus the cost of purchase for the new roof.

It seems like that version was in testing at that point, and is now ready for general consumer sales and purchase. The solar tiles have not seemed to have seen consumer installations in any kind of significant scale to date, with existing customers with reservations in place claiming they haven’t heard much in the way of installation timeline expectations. Perhaps we’ll learn more about availability and roll-out plans along with tomorrow’s “official” launch of the version-three product.

Darren Bechtel (yes, of those Bechtels) has raised $97.5 million for his firm, Brick & Mortar Ventures

Published August 13, 2019

Brick & Mortar Ventures, a young, San Francisco-based venture firm that’s focused on startups innovating in or around architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management, has closed with $97.2 million in capital commitments.

The fund is one in a sea of debut funds that have swung open their doors in recent years, though it’s also interesting for numerous reasons, beginning with its founder, Darren Bechtel, who knows a thing or two about the building industry. He’s a scion of the family that built the 120-year-old, privately held company Bechtel into one of the largest construction and engineering firms in the world. In fact, his brother, Brendan, who was named CEO in 2016, represents the fifth generation of Bechtels to lead the company. (Their sister, Katherine, is a project controls manager with the powerhouse outfit.)

Brick & Mortar’s investors are just as notable. They aren’t the typical pension funds and university endowments that many VCs try hard to lock down. Instead, they comprise a long list of companies that are part of the “construction value chain” and so have an interest in the latest and greatest developments in their respective industries. Among the firm’s backers, for example, is the special materials maker Ardex; the software giant Autodesk; the building materials company CEMEX; Ferguson Ventures, which is the venture arm of a huge U.S distributor of plumbing supplies; FMI, a management consulting company to the engineering and construction industry; Obayashi, a major Japanese construction company; Sidewalk Labs, which is Alphabet’s urban innovation organization; and United Rentals, one of the world’s largest equipment rental companies.

Brick & Mortar isn’t the first venture firm to focus on the so-called built world. Other firms that focus largely, if not exclusively, around the same themes include Fifth Wall Ventures, Navitas Capital, Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, MetaProp, Starwood Capital and Tamarisc Ventures.

In fact, Darren Bechtel has ties to and is an individual investor in Fifth Wall, an LA-based firm that stormed onto the scene in 2017 with an equally impressive, and very different, roster of limited partners in the real estate industry, from which it has already amassed more than $700 million in capital commitments across two funds.

As Bechtel told us on a call late last week, he was going to go into business with Fifth Wall’s founders initially, but they wanted to raise a lot of money, and Bechtel was thinking more conservatively — for a reason. “I’d done five deals on AngelList with [Fifth Wall co-founder] Brendan [Wallace] and we’d started putting together a pitch deck, and as we were thinking through ideal fund structure and size, Brendan said $500 million and I said $50 million,” says Bechtel.

Wallace was thinking big, says Bechtel, because “hospitality already had some massive players — Airbnb, WeWork. It was a far more mature landscape, and Brendan thought that if we were going to own a category, we needed the capital to secure a leadership position in the right deals.”

Bechtel thinks Wallace was right, too. He says he just came to realize that construction tech — which is what really interested him — was in its own league, and it was in its infancy. Though the construction software company PlanGrid took off like gangbusters — Bechtel wrote the largest check during the company’s seed round — it wasn’t so long ago that “there were great, billion-dollar ideas being formed but the rounds were small and the valuations were small,” says Bechtel. Because the “investment community didn’t understand what it was looking at, I had concerns about our ability to generate returns if we had too large a fund.”

In the end, the friends and former Stanford MBA classmates decided to split their respective focus on real estate and hospitality (Fifth Wall) and the actual construction of buildings (Brick & Mortar), and things seem to have gone well since. As Fifth Wall has gained traction, so too has Brick & Mortar, which is now a couple of years in the making. Indeed, though Bechtel is announcing the close of Brick & Mortar’s first fund today, he already works with two principals and two associates, and they’ve collectively sourced and funded 16 startups to date with capital they’ve been raising from investors along the way.

One of those checks went to Fieldwire, a maker of field management software for construction teams. They’ve also backed Serious Labs, which trains workers how to use heavy equipment and tools via virtual reality software, and Curbio, a real estate technology startup that orchestrates turnkey renovations for home sellers, then gets paid back once the home is sold.

Brick & Mortar even has an exit already, having helped fund the construction software platform BuildingConnected, which sold last December to Autodesk. (Bechtel’s earlier investment in PlanGrid, which also sold to Autodesk last year, was a personal investment, one of roughly 40 he made before setting out to create a traditional venture firm.)

As for whether Brick & Mortar ever hunts for companies that Bechtel — the firm founded by Darren’s great-great-grandfather — might like to acquire or otherwise partner with, Darren is quick to note that the firm is not an investor in his venture fund or any or its portfolio companies, and he doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what’s happening there.

“I don’t work at Bechtel or pretend to know what their intentions are, though my brother is CEO, so you could say I know a guy there.”

More, he notes, he doesn’t think it would make sense to fund a company that “a user would want to acquire. If one user buys [a startup’s tools] because they want exclusivity, they’re limiting the exit value of that company.” To underscore his point, he notes that “Bechtel does around $30 billion a year, but the construction market is an $11 trillion market.” In the end, he says, it’s “better to have a preferred relationship. Maybe you get the next year’s model released early; maybe you get custom colors.” But if you’ve developed a winning product, you want to make it accessible to everyone. “You benefit the most by having a technology adopted by the whole industry.”

Above, the Brick & Mortar Ventures team. From left to right: Austin Yount, senior associate; Alice Leung, associate; Curtis Rodgers, principal; Darren Bechtel, general partner; and Kaustubh Pandya, principal.

Beyond costs, what else can we do to make housing affordable?

Published May 14, 2019

Daniel Wu
Contributor

Dan Wu is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta. He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School.

Social impact innovations

These innovations address:

Innovations in inclusive housing

Published May 13, 2019

Daniel Wu
Contributor

Dan Wu is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta. He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School.

Topics We Explore

Today:

Part 1. Innovations in the key phases of housing

Coming Tomorrow:

Part 2. Other contributions to housing affordability
- Social Impact Innovations
- Landlord-Tenant Tools
- Innovations that Increase Income
- Innovations that Increase Transit Accessibility and Reduce Parking
- Innovations that Improve the Ability to Regulate Housing
- Organizations that Support the Housing Innovation Ecosystem
- This Is Just the Beginning
- I’m Personally Closely Watching the Following Initiatives
- The Limitations of Technology
- Move Fast and Protect People

Please feel free to let me know what else is exciting by adding a note to your LinkedIn invite here.

If you’re excited about this topic, feel free to subscribe to my future of inclusive housing newsletter by viewing a past issue here.

Corporations and private investors are backing new ‘green’ deals as climate worries mount

Published April 22, 2019

In the nine years since private equity and venture capital investments into sustainable technologies last crossed the $6 billion threshold, the problems caused by global carbon emissions have only intensified.

Now, as the world confronts the reality that there’s not much time left to reverse course on carbon emissions and the impact they will have on life on earth, both corporate and private investors are once again stepping up their commitments to startups in the space.

In 2018, global venture capital investment into startups focused on sustainability jumped 127 percent, to $9.2 billion, the highest since 2010, according to a January report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Powering that boost was a $1.1 billion investment in the smart window maker, View, and another $795 million for Chinese electric vehicle firm Youxia Motors. In fact, there were no fewer than eight VC/PE financings of Chinese EV specialist companies in 2018, totaling some $3.3 billion.

That stark assessment is coming from more corners of the scientific community, and the reality of the danger is being emphasized by politicians and concerned citizens around the globe.

The simple truth is that things are getting worse. And for the past two years, emissions have been increasing as countries continue to use oil and gas and coal to fuel economic growth, even as the global community realizes that carbon emissions are an increasing threat.

A recent assessment by the U.S. government put the cost of climate change caused by carbon emissions at $500 billion annually by the end of the century. And the financial toll doesn’t begin to assess the cost to the quality of human life and the potential lives that will be lost because of climate-related disasters.

New US report says that climate change could cost nearly $500B per year by 2090

This isn’t the first time the world has realized the threat climate change poses. It’s not even the second. Back in 1979 — and throughout the next decade — the U.S. grappled with how to craft an appropriate response to the coming climate-related crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the government failed, and the issue of imminent climate disaster was set aside.

Former Vice President Al Gore picked up the thread in the mid-2000s in the wake of his defeat to the Connecticut Yankee turned Texas oilman George W. Bush in the contested 2000 presidential election. Through advocacy work and the popular climate-focused documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore was able to proselytize among a group of technocrats looking for the next big thing in the wake of the internet explosion that had transformed professional and personal lives.

Venture capital investors flocked to invest in renewable technologies — from biofuels to new solar energy generating technologies to new battery chemistries and beyond.

Over the next seven years billion-dollar companies would rise and fall on the back of speculative investment in the promise of a cleaner energy future that would disrupt the oil industry and turn billionaires into multi-billionaires — all while saving the world.

It didn’t work out.

Problems with scaling technologies beyond a controlled laboratory setting; global economic pressures wrought by an explosion of manufacturing capacity in countries like China; and the hubris of investors who thought that their investment acumen in picking winners of the information age could work just as well in centuries-old industries like oil and gas, or electricity, found themselves floundering in complicated, regulated markets with deep-pocketed incumbents and entrenched interests in promoting the status quo.

In the process, investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. alone, and destabilized some of the oldest firms in the investment industry.

Now, companies and investors are returning to the market in a major way. Some of the largest businesses in the food and agriculture industry are investing in new companies that are developing protein replacements and novel cultivation technologies; utilities are investing more heavily in smart grid technologies as electrification and microgrids become more real; automakers and battery manufacturers are backing new energy storage technologies; and frontier investors are backing companies tackling everything from biologically based chemical manufacturing to new construction technologies for smart homes and cities, to new kinds of nuclear power that could transform how the world conceives of energy abundance (along with geo-engineering tech to remove carbon from the atmosphere).

“In the last few years, the number of technologies ripe for investment has expanded dramatically,” Ravi Manghani, research director for energy storage at Wood Mackenzie, an energy research and consultancy firm, told CNBC in March. “It’s no longer just three or four technology verticals.”

While none of these technological advancements are a guaranteed solution to the threats carbon emissions pose, or are surefire commercially viable businesses, the fact that investors are once again looking at sustainability as a viable investment thesis — capable of producing multiple billion-dollar businesses — is a good step forward.

Any plan to address decarbonization has to confront industries as diverse as agriculture, construction, transportation, chemicals and consumer goods from clothes to chemicals.

How to decarbonize America — and the world

Failure to confront these challenges would be catastrophic. Even if global warming is restricted to just the 2 degree Celsius target set at the Paris climate agreement, that could mean the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs and several meters of sea-level rise, as The New York Times reported last August. Already the impacts of climate change have meant tens of billions of dollars in damage for the U.S. in 2018 alone.

“The era of incrementalism on climate change is over,” said Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, one of the architects of the “Green New Deal” legislation, in an interview with Vox. “We are now in the era of the Green New Deal. It’s not going away. It is creating an incentive for governors to do more, for mayors to do more, for companies to do more. The polling says it has political legs that will drive it right into the election of 2020, and when that cycle is done, I think we’re going to see a much greater capacity for us to take the kind of action that we need.”

Cove.Tool wants to solve climate change one efficient building at a time

Published December 4, 2018

As the fight against climate change heats up, Cove.Tool is looking to help tackle carbon emissions one building at a time.

The Atlanta-based startup provides an automated big-data platform that helps architects, engineers and contractors identify the most cost-effective ways to make buildings compliant with energy efficiency requirements. After raising an initial round earlier this year, the company completed the final close of a $750,000 seed round. Since the initial announcement of the round earlier this month, Urban Us, the early-stage fund focused on companies transforming city life, has joined the syndicate comprised of Tech Square Labs and Knoll Ventures.

Helping firms navigate a growing suite of energy standards and options

Cove.Tool software allows building designers and managers to plug in a variety of building conditions, energy options, and zoning specifications to get to the most cost-effective method of hitting building energy efficiency requirements (Cove.Tool Press Image / Cove.Tool / https://covetool.com).

In the US, the buildings we live and work in contribute more carbon emissions than any other sector. Governments across the country are now looking to improve energy consumption habits by implementing new building codes that set higher energy efficiency requirements for buildings.

However, figuring out the best ways to meet changing energy standards has become an increasingly difficult task for designers. For one, buildings are subject to differing federal, state and city codes that are all frequently updated and overlaid on one another. Therefore, the specific efficiency requirements for a building can be hard to understand, geographically unique and immensely variable from project to project.

Architects, engineers and contractors also have more options for managing energy consumption than ever before – equipped with tools like connected devices, real-time energy-management software and more-affordable renewable energy resources. And the effectiveness and cost of each resource are also impacted by variables distinct to each project and each location, such as local conditions, resource placement, and factors as specific as the amount of shade a building sees.

With designers and contractors facing countless resource combinations and weightings, Cove.Tool looks to make it easier to identify and implement the most cost-effective and efficient resource bundles that can be used to hit a building’s energy efficiency requirements.

Cove.Tool users begin by specifying a variety of project-specific inputs, which can include a vast amount of extremely granular detail around a building’s use, location, dimensions or otherwise. The software runs the inputs through a set of parametric energy models before spitting out the optimal resource combination under the set parameters.

For example, if a project is located on a site with heavy wind flow in a cold city, the platform might tell you to increase window size and spend on energy efficient wall installations, while reducing spending on HVAC systems. Along with its recommendations, Cove.Tool provides in-depth but fairly easy-to-understand graphical analyses that illustrate various aspects of a building’s energy performance under different scenarios and sensitivities.

Cove.Tool users can input granular project-specifics, such as shading from particular beams and facades, to get precise analyses around a building’s energy performance under different scenarios and sensitivities.

Democratizing building energy modeling

Traditionally, the design process for a building’s energy system can be quite painful for architecture and engineering firms.

An architect would send initial building designs to engineers, who then test out a variety of energy system scenarios over the course a few weeks. By the time the engineers are able to come back with an analysis, the architects have often made significant design changes, which then gets sent back to the engineers, forcing the energy plan to constantly be 1-to-3 months behind the rest of the building. This process can not only lead to less-efficient and more-expensive energy infrastructure, but the hectic back-and-forth can lead to longer project timelines, unexpected construction issues, delays and budget overruns.

Cove.Tool effectively looks to automate the process of “energy modeling.” The energy modeling looks to ease the pains of energy design in the same ways Building Information Modeling (BIM) has transformed architectural design and construction. Just as BIM creates predictive digital simulations that test all the design attributes of a project, energy modeling uses building specs, environmental conditions, and various other parameters to simulate a building’s energy efficiency, costs and footprint.

By using energy modeling, developers can optimize the design of the building’s energy system, adjust plans in real-time, and more effectively manage the construction of a building’s energy infrastructure. However, the expertise needed for energy modeling falls outside the comfort zones of many firms, who often have to outsource the task to expensive consultants.

The frustrations of energy system design and the complexities of energy modeling are ones the Cove.Tool team knows well. Patrick Chopson and Sandeep Ajuha, two of the company’s three co-founders, are former architects that worked as energy modeling consultants when they first began building out the Cove.Tool software.

After seeing their clients’ initial excitement over the ability to quickly analyze millions of combinations and instantly identify the ones that produce cost and energy savings, Patrick and Sandeep teamed up with CTO Daniel Chopson and focused full-time on building out a comprehensive automated solution that would allow firms to run energy modeling analysis without costly consultants, more quickly, and through an interface that would be easy enough for an architectural intern to use.

So far there seems to be serious demand for the product, with the company already boasting an impressive roster of customers that includes several of the country’s largest architecture firms, such as HGA, HKS and Cooper Carry. And the platform has delivered compelling results – for example, one residential developer was able to identify energy solutions that cost $2 million less than the building’s original model. With the funds from its seed round, Cove.Tool plans further enhance its sales effort while continuing to develop additional features for the platform.

Changing decision-making and fighting climate change

The value proposition Cove.Tool hopes to offer is clear – the company wants to make it easier, faster and cheaper for firms to use innovative design processes that help identify the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solutions for their buildings, all while reducing the risks of redesign, delay and budget overruns.

Longer-term, the company hopes that it can help the building industry move towards more innovative project processes and more informed decision-making while making a serious dent in the fight against emissions.

“We want to change the way decisions are made. We want decisions to move away from being just intuition to become more data-driven.” The co-founders told TechCrunch.

“Ultimately we want to help stop climate change one building at a time. Stopping climate change is such a huge undertaking but if we can change the behavior of buildings it can be a bit easier. Architects and engineers are working hard but they need help and we need to change.”

By automating code compliance, UpCodes AI is ‘the spellcheck for buildings’

Published June 11, 2018

For many architects, the hardest part of their job starts after they finish designing a building, when the onerous process of code compliance begins. Written to ensure the safety and accessibility of buildings, codes dictate everything from the height and depth of stairs and where railings end, to the amount of floor space in front of toilets and the height of windows. Regulations are constantly updated, which means that even the most diligent team of architects often miss violations, resulting in costly delays. Y Combinator alum UpCodes wants to help them by using artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, to create what the San Francisco-based startup describes as “the spellcheck for buildings.”

Called UpCodes AI, the program is a plug-in that scans 3D models created with building information modeling (BIM) data and alerts architects about potential issues. It draws on the same backend as UpCodes’ first product, an app that compiles regulations into a constantly updated, searchable database with collaboration tools. UpCodes AI, which launched to the public last week, currently supports recent versions of Autodesk Revit and will add ARCHICAD, Sketchup and IFC in the future.

“This is like Grammarly for the construction industry. By highlighting code errors in real-time, the software acts as a code consultant working beside you at all times,” UpCodes co-founder and CEO Scott Reynolds tells TechCrunch.

UpCodes’ co-founders Garrett and Scott Reynolds and UpCodes AI technical lead Mark Vulfson

UpCodes was founded in 2016 after Reynolds became so frustrated by traditional code compliance while working as an architect that he switched career paths and launched the startup with his brother Garrett, a former software engineer at PlanGrid, to fix the process.

Building codes change so often that they are sometimes referred to as “living documents.” UpCodes’ database draws directly on regulations put online by municipalities and is updated almost in real-time. This eases a major pain point because many architects who thought they had followed regulations find out too late that they missed an amendment. In worst case scenarios, completed work needs to be torn out and rebuilt, potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars. This is a frequent occurrence and Scott Reynolds points to studies by McKinsey and the National Association of Home Builders that cite the complexity of code compliance as a major reason for reduced productivity in the construction industry and rising home prices.

Automating code compliance may also make it easier for architects to expand their practices, since regulations can vary dramatically between jurisdictions. UpCodes currently covers building codes in 26 states and the District of Columbia. Though UpCodes AI is still in its early stages, Reynolds tells TechCrunch that during its private beta it identified an average of about 27 violations per project.

One of its private beta users was Nicholas LoCicero, a designer with CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm known for retail design. LoCicero told TechCrunch in an email that the company used UpCodes AI on two retail locations that needed brand updates. Accessibility, which includes making sure that there are unobstructed ways of exiting a building from any point within it, is one of the most important parts of code compliance, and LoCicero said UpCodes AI was able to flag issues with door clearance, depth on stairs and tread width more quickly than the typical compliance process.

The program “definitely has the potential to save us hours of time with smart egress and accessibility tools and components that will help us develop projects faster during different phases of design” while ensuring that compliance is maintained, he added.

So far, UpCodes has raised $785,000 in funding from angel investors, as well as Y Combinator and Foundation Capital. It now has over 100,000 monthly active users and recently hired Mark Vulfson, former senior manager of engineering at PlanGrid, to serve as UpCodes AI’s technical lead.

Though the adoption of BIM data has made planning buildings more efficient, that’s “only a modest use of BIM’s full potential,” Reynolds says. He notes that it’s just within the past few years that more than 50% of American architecture firms have started using 3D information-rich modeling instead of 2D modeling. Programs like Revit and ARCHICAD, and new developments in APIs, finally made automated code compliance possible.

The use of AI in architecture is still new, but there are already several companies, including Autodesk and CoPlannery, exploring how to apply AI technologies to solve common problems in design, construction and engineering. Since AI is used in other major industries, including finance and healthcare, to automate compliance, it makes sense to assume that somewhere down the line, another company might try to build a competitor to UpCodes AI.

Reynolds believes that the UpCodes team’s combined industry and technical expertise will give it an edge over future rivals. He says his brother Garrett has a background in diffusion MRI analyzing large 4D data sets, while Vulfson brings “extensive experience deploying client side and web-based products” to the startup. UpCodes also works with a building code consultant who is based in New York City.

“The whole industry of code compliance has been neglected by software engineers for so long that it’s hard to imagine someone else doing what we’re doing,” Reynolds says.

“Building codes are a creativity killer. These regulations are one of the most restrictive components of design,” he adds. “Imagine restricting every brush stroke an artist makes with ten thousand rules–that’s what building codes feel like to an architect. That’s why I quit my career to do this. I want to take away that frustration and make architecture more fun, like it is in school.”

Oracle to buy construction collaboration software maker Aconex for $1.2B in cash

Published December 18, 2017

Oracle will pay $1.2 billion in cash to buy construction software developer Aconex, the companies announced today. Based in Melbourne, Aconex’s cloud-based software allow teams working on building projects to collaborate and share documents. Oracle agreed to pay AUD $7.80 (about $5.97) per share in cash for a total of $1.2 billion. This price represents a 47% premium over… Read More

Eat the suburbs

Published August 2, 2017

The cicadas rev up as the summer sun bakes the carefully tended lawns of suburban Dublin, Ohio. Houses sit exposed like cattle in the heat, the trees too small to offer a shaded window or cool spot on the driveway so everything is shut tight. The only ones outside for any length of time are the folks cutting grass, fixing awnings, installing cable. The one man walking in the sun is the father… Read More

How Bassem Hamdy aims to disrupt the construction industry

Published July 10, 2017

Construction – the actual process of putting brick on brick to build something – is still in the dark ages. While there is plenty of technology out there to help plan massive projects few people are thinking hard about what it takes to actually build. Luckily Bassem Hamdy is one the case. Hamdy works for Procore Technologies where he and his team build products to help… Read More