Why Beyond Brix is different from 3D Printing, Boxabl, Veev, and others
With all the challenges in construction: weather delays, skilled labour shortages, interest rates that have climed, and improtantly, the limited speed, we've seen a major rise in alternatives hitting the market. But not always successfully.
Many companies have tried to solve the problem, and failed
About 95-97% of all the new construction in the US is still stick built. With alternatives making up less that 5%. We’ve studied the post-mortems to make sure we don’t become one, and here are the 3 main reasons our predecessors failed:
Over capitalizing early
Our predecessors made one more critical mistake: they overcapitalized early. Raising major funding without crazy market fit is a huge risk and applies immense pressure. Raising $100 million out the gate sounds sexy, but we are firm believers in walking before you run.
Building an expensive house is easy
Alternatives are often MORE expensive than traditional housing. Yes, the quality may very well be better, and its faster to build. But getting a buyer to opt in for something new that's even more expensive than the house just next door, is a hard sell. Albert Einstein said "Any fool can make something complicated, it takes a genius to make it simple".
Pushing a different material
This is the biggest one. Building with composites, containers, 3D printing concrete, and so many others fail. Why? Getting underwriters, banks, buyers, counties, all behind a new process is hard, but adding a new material to the mix makes it almost impossible. How will it perform over time? Will it resell? How is everything connected and are the connections solid? Plumbing, electrical, fire saftey? The questions go on and on, and then it becomes an easy no.
Why we build with timber and not something else
Most of the companies that tried alternative building technologies before us failed when they tried to introduce a new material that no home buyer or financier was familiar with.
Katerra raised more than two billion dollars, much of it from SoftBank, and shut down in 2021. Veev filed for bankruptcy in late 2023, and Lennar acquired the assets. Both companies had real talent and real technology. Both ran into an industry whose gatekeepers are not engineers. They are appraisers, lenders, insurers and building officials, and every one of them prices unfamiliarity as risk.
If an appraiser cannot find comparable sales, the buyer cannot get a loan. If a carrier has never underwritten your wall assembly, the premium reflects that. If the local authority has not seen your system before, your schedule belongs to the review queue. A novel material can be better in every measurable way and still be unfinanceable, and unfinanceable is the same as unsellable.
So, we made a deliberate choice. Our Timber Engineered Super Structures (TESS®) are exactly what the name says. Engineered timber, sitting on a permanent concrete foundation, assembled into a home that any appraiser in Texas already knows how to value and any lender already knows how to underwrite. No steel frame. No experimental composite. No material that requires a thirty-minute explanation before someone will “maaaybe” write a mortgage against it.
We put the innovation in the process and left the material alone.
Our homes are meant to be bought, financed, insured and resold like every other house.
We're lucky. We get to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors, and avoid the same mistakes:
We're raising a Seed Round that gets us walking before we run.
We've designed a process that produces a higher quality home, that is LESS expensive than traditional stick builds.
And we are using a material that everyone is familiar with. Not just to be different but because we truly believe it's the right material for home buyers, the environment and to produce the most incredible homes.
Want to know more? Follow me on Linked In, you'll be seeing our Stage 1 factory go up very soon!
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