Announcing Juno: shaping the future of urban real estate development

Today we’re proud to announce Juno, a product company that’s creating a radically new model for the future of urban residential real estate development. We’re on a mission to design and develop the next generation of living spaces that will enrich residents’ lives and allow neighborhoods and cities to flourish.

Writing the next chapter of the American urban experience

We started Juno in 2019 with the belief that neighborhoods and cities will need to evolve to support the next chapter of urbanization. We set off to answer a set of important questions — questions that have become even more important given the current reality of COVID-19 and what it means for the future of urbanization. How can people benefit from all that cities have to offer if they fear for their overall health? Why would someone want to live in a neighborhood if they feel completely disconnected from it? How will cities survive a remote-first work culture? Can cities deliver on their promise of supporting diversity of experience if they’re too expensive for everyone except the most wealthy?

What society is experiencing today signals an opportunity to set urban development on a path to answer these questions and redefine how development happens — starting with the apartment buildings millions of people call home.

When it comes down to it, an apartment is just a consumer product, albeit a really big one. It’s a product that some 50 million people in the US use every day and allocate 20–30% (or more) of their income toward. But despite how much we spend on rent, an apartment’s features, design, and materials haven’t significantly evolved over the last 30 years.

The stark reality is that what we build and how we build need to catch-up: to our values, to our technology, and to our potential as a society. This starts with being at the driving seat of the development value chain: the first vertically aligned development platform.

Building a product that matters

Juno is approaching the entire real estate development process like product development: with a focus on the user, or in our case, the resident. In considering our user, we begin to ask some more difficult questions: How can we celebrate the natural world in a home that may be miles from the nearest forest? How can we make living spaces healthier for the people who inhabit them? How can we effectively connect residents to the digital world, all while empowering them to engage with their neighborhoods and their neighbors?

We’ve begun to answer these questions in ways that challenge the status quo for traditional residential development. Specifically, we are focusing our efforts on creating buildings that deliver on four core domains:

Sustainability: To deliver on the promise of a truly sustainable living experience, we’re introducing new materials like mass timber to the structure of our building, creating highly insulated exterior walls to minimize energy loss, installing energy-efficient systems, and eliminating natural gas from our buildings entirely. However, sustainability must also be felt, which is why we’re celebrating renewable materials and plant life throughout our buildings, and eventually creating incentives for lower energy consumption.

Resident Wellness: The materials used to finish a building, the way air is circulated, how much natural light is made available, how interior light is emitted into a home, and access to the natural world all impact well-being in meaningful ways. Every living space is designed to prioritize natural light and air, greenery, high ceilings, antimicrobial surfaces, and adaptive lighting that changes as the day progresses. Additionally, all of our units are designed to be ADA compliant.

Organically Connected: We believe living spaces should be able to connect to both the digital world and the analog world around them. Hardware can help determine how people flow in and out of a building, and software can help support how a neighborhood and local businesses connect with a building’s residents in real and meaningful ways. Homes that connect appliances and other devices to a smart hub are just the beginning of what makes a home connected.

Designed with care: Too often, well-designed spaces are only made available to the wealthy or to institutions that can afford to foot an astronomical bill for design services and premium materials. We believe it’s time to democratize great design and bring a new level of quality, care, and curation to apartment living. By considering every square inch of space, we’ve been able to remove traditionally wasteful, undervalued spaces and maximize the places residents spend the most time.

Delivering on a vision

Bringing Juno buildings into the world requires challenging conventional wisdom of how we build just as much as what we build. Specifically, we believe there are learnings from manufacturing and supply chain management, as well as significant innovations in the built environment, that make it possible to introduce an entirely new way of developing our product. The result: the first end-to-end platform to connect and streamline the entire real estate development process. Specific attributes of the Juno platform include:

Componentization: By designing living spaces like a product, we’ve brought consistency to a field that usually treats each project as a one-off. With consistency comes the ability to componentize and streamline the entire design process. By using a similar set of components, we can develop a deep understanding of how they’re designed, assembled, transported, installed, and maintained.

Decentralized Manufacturing: The conventional wisdom around off-site construction resembles the Model-T Ford assembly lines of the 1920s more so than the Apple or Toyota supply chains of today. Juno is taking a wholly different approach to the materials supply chain, acting as the very first Real Estate Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). This approach is integral to making our product come together efficiently, and has been made possible by an increasingly robust number of fabrication partners right here in the United States.

Dynamic Assembly: Both on-site (traditional) and off-site (prefabrication) assembly are static by definition. Juno’s components are by-and-large created with dynamic assembly in mind. We can have components assembled on-site or off-site depending on what makes the most sense.

Aligning the Value Chain

Juno is both a platform and a developer, working to coordinate the entire development process in a more streamlined and efficient manner. We work with brilliant and driven stakeholders to bring alignment to the value chain and unlock the value of our design and our platform. We partner with local developers to co-develop projects and bring some of the most established general contractors, architects, and engineers together to deploy our buildings at scale. As a result, we have created an external team of partners that is dedicated to using, learning from, and deploying a product that will create value for themselves and for residents alike.

Assembling a team of experts

Juno has brought together a collective of experts from companies like Apple, Tesla, Nest, Goldman Sachs, Turner Construction, Related, and Tishman Speyer. Each member of our team has been part of building industry-defining businesses across design, architecture, real estate and consumer technology. I’m proud to be working with this group of pragmatic optimists, including my co-founders BJ Siegel, Marshall Everett, and Chester Chipperfield.

We are also extremely lucky to be supported by a group of mission-aligned investors who believe in changing the face of residential development forever.

The Road Ahead

A single apartment building can welcome interaction or it can block it off. It can provide refuge or it can create unease. If built with care, a building can do so much more than give us a place to live. It can reinforce the values that we hold close, support our well-being, and protect us while keeping us connected to the communities and cities we love. We are excited to embark on creating buildings that deliver on this promise, and on the promise of cities, for years to come.