A backyard-home construction startup in California has raised $60 million in new funding as it continues to scale its business.
The company, known as Cover, revealed the Series B funding on Thursday in an announcement on its website. Gigafund led this investment round, with investment firms Founders Fund, Valor Equity Partners, General Catalyst and Fifty Years also contributing.
“The process of building homes has been stagnant for decades, and we need to fix that in order to make housing more affordable,” Gigafund Managing Partner Stephen Oskoui said in the announcement.
Cover launched in 2017 with a model of building small, custom dwelling units in people’s backyards. One of its tools provides consumers an idea of the type of structure they could build in their yards, a process that takes a matter of minutes.
“Our approach has been to start small and focused, iterate quickly, and then scale,” the company said in its announcement.
On the construction side, the business relies on a prefabrication model. Walls, floors and roofs are manufactured off-site in a factory, then moved to their eventual site and assembled over a 30-day period. The company uses technology systems to navigate the design, engineering and permitting processes.
“There are lots of exciting, hard engineering problems out there but few have as big an impact directly on people’s everyday lives as reengineering homes as a product,” Katya Stavisky, a Cover mechanical engineer, said in the company statement.
The new funding will be used to grow the company’s workforce and invest further in innovation, the company said.
“We’re hiring across a breadth of roles, including software, mechanical, and manufacturing engineering,” the announcement reads.
For now, the company only serves homeowners in the city of Los Angeles.
In an interview with The Real Deal, Cover co-founder and CEO Alexis Rivas said the company will continue to scale construction in L.A. before expanding nationally.