Announcing Juno’s Series A: Advancing a more sustainable future for cities

Today I’m excited to announce Juno’s Series A funding, a massive milestone in bringing a more sustainable future to people in cities around the world. We already have more than 400 apartment units in development, and with our Series A, we will continue to advance our mission.

Creating housing for the next chapter of urbanism

Juno is simplifying the entire apartment development process to improve multifamily buildings for residents, investors, and the planet. By creating buildings worthy of repeating, we can do more for the people who inhabit them, as well as create software and supply chains to design and build them more efficiently so net zero development becomes the rule, not the exception.

At its core, Juno is an integrated design and supply chain company that creates extraordinary buildings with partner architects and engineers. We use software and scripts to accelerate the design process and connect building design to an increasing network of partner suppliers across the country and around the world. We partner with visionary developers and landowners to make better housing a reality for the next generation of city dwellers.

The platform we are building also lays the groundwork for something that is quite uncommon in real estate: continuous improvement. All the information we gather about a building’s design, materials, and assembly, not only make our processes more efficient, they also make it possible to monitor a building once it’s built, and allow for the building process to learn from those that came before it.

Productization

We started Juno to build extraordinary places for the people who experienced them on a daily basis: residents. Housing is a product that people consume like no other: it’s where our day’s stories begin and where they end. As the ones creating homes for people to experience for hours each day, we have the incredibly important job of doing so in ways that make people feel safe, healthy, and able to live their most fulfilling lives.

By designing housing like a product, we are finally able to create homes that stand for values that transcend geography. In doing so, we can also create tools and systems to enable continuous improvement and increase efficiency. Much like Apple’s approach to product development, Juno is laser focused on integrated product design - ensuring that design decisions are driven by operational feasibility, cost, and supply chain constraints. When considered in this way, housing becomes something very different: a product for living.

In the world of products large and small, customization breaks the efficiencies of manufacturing and the economies of scale that are core to advancing the features of the product itself. If every iPhone was custom built for each person who purchased one, Apple would likely have to charge $10,000 or more per phone. If Toyota built cars with an infinite number of options, a Camry would cost 10–20x its current sticker price. However, in traditional real estate development, every building is treated as an alpha. Even buildings that look and feel identical to one another share nothing in the way of process efficiencies, economies of scale, or continuous improvement.

Productization aims to break that cycle through a radically simple idea: that by creating higher quality, more beautiful, and more sustainable buildings that deserve to be repeated because of what they stand for, investing in the systems and structural changes needed to drive greater precision, efficiency, and lower risk into the industry becomes possible. In other words, by changing what we make, we are able to change how we make it. But for a building to justify existing more than once, it needs to stand for something exceptional and support the people who experience it in extraordinary ways.

Over the last year we invested heavily on building a set of digital tools that allow us to unlock the efficiencies of productization. Our tools now drastically reduce design timelines and create output that makes activities like procurement, scheduling, estimation, and components installation easier. In fact, our design process has clocked in at 60% faster than traditional building design, saving both time and money for developments.

Material Change: Mass Timber for the Masses

While the idea of productization can be applied to any building type, we were immediately drawn to creating a product to address two urgent needs: increasing quality housing supply in fast-growing cities around the world, and reducing the carbon footprint of the building industry. The opportunity to rethink the development of apartments in ways that embrace quality, design, sustainability, and connectivity that haven’t been available to the world at scale before is one we haven’t taken lightly.

Today we are building the first networks of mass timber-framed apartment buildings in the country. If we look past the noise of 3-D printing and other attempted material innovations, the future of building actually lies in materials and suppliers that have been tried and tested for decades, but are hungry for a new market.

Structural, or ‘mass’ timber has become increasingly popular as a material in Europe in the last 25 years, but it still remains under-used in the US. However, Juno has set off to change that.

While framing is just one family within Juno’s product library, it is an important one. Today we are in the development stages of buildings that are up to 270’ in height and framed with up to 18 stories of wood. The environmental impact is massive

We believe that creating buildings that sequester carbon instead of emitting it is just the start. Beyond the more sustainable materials and processes driving Juno’s development, we’ve also prioritized creating sustainable spaces that residents can actually feel — through the finishes we choose, the design, and the everyday living experience. And thanks to our focus on all-electric buildings in cities that have established roadmaps to clean energy generation, the Juno residential system is trending toward a net zero target for embodied carbon in its multifamily residential units.

Sourcing: The first OEM model in Real Estate

Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) has been around for more than 70 years. OEMs make component parts for product companies who design products and orchestrate their assembly. Productization has allowed us to create the first OEM ecosystem for our parts, which means that we get to benefit from the expertise of suppliers who have a history developing parts for the building industry, but who may not have applied their expertise to multi-family development before.

A tenet of our work stems from the creation of decentralized and global supply chains for our buildings. Juno doesn’t own lumber mills, prefab assembly plants, or window fabricators, unlike the dozens of companies that have stood up to challenge the status quo in the construction industry. Rather, we are focused on using deep domain expertise in supply chain management to make exceptional buildings more predictable than ever before possible.

Today we have formalized relationships with more than a dozen of the most forward-thinking fabricators and suppliers in the world to bring our product to market. We are looking upstream to how these suppliers supply their materials and how we can collectively build the future together.

Creating vertical alignment: partnerships make our work possible

Our ecosystem of industry-leading partners are a core part of our progress and our success. Our partners at Ennead Architects, Swinerton Builders, UrbanOne Construction, Holmes, and dozens of others have been integral for both the R&D of our work and as execution partners for our first cohort of projects.

As part of our Series A, we’ve raised a $20M round with investment from Comcast Ventures, Real Estate Technology Ventures, Khosla Ventures, JLL Spark, Vertex Ventures, Anim, Foundamental, Green D Ventures, and K50. This builds on our $12M seed from last year, funded by Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, Vertex Ventures, Metaprop, Abstract Ventures, GFC, Liquid 2 Ventures, FJ Labs, and angels including Max Ventilla (altschool), and JD Ross (Opendoor) as well as Scouts from Sequoia and Founders Fund.

We are looking forward to engaging with the most forward-thinking developers across the US as we set off on this exciting new chapter. If you’re a forward-thinking developer or land owner, stay tuned for more information on how to get involved and build the future with us.

Jonathan Scherr is cofounder and CEO of Juno.