Why We Invested in Diamond Age (Again!)
Team, Technology & Traction
Today, we are thrilled to share that we are leading a $50 million Series A funding round in Diamond Age, after leading its $8 million seed round in late 2020. It was an easy decision to double down on the Diamond Age team, having watched them execute for the last 12+ months. They hit all milestones — team, technology, and traction. And their other early investors agreed. Alpaca VC, Dolby Family Ventures, and Gaingels all participated and are joined by new investor Signia Venture Partners. In addition, $10 million of the round came from production home builders and land developers.
My partner Bryan Bauw and I have continued to build our own thesis and conviction in construction tech. Countless discussions with home builders, insurance companies, and landowners informed our point of view and our desire to “go big” with Diamond Age. Homebuilding hasn’t truly evolved in the last 100 years. Hammers are still swung, roofing shingles are still sold in bundles, assuming a human is carrying it up a ladder. But the pressure is on and the technology is ready. The lack of availability of labor has driven sectors like construction and agriculture to tipping points. When combined with decreasing costs in robotics, we’ve reached the “why now” for adoption of new technologies. There simply aren’t enough people wanting to do these jobs conventionally, and those who do — desire the opportunity to move into higher-skilled, higher-compensated parts of the stack.
Homebuilders told us they want to solve for labor, time to build (cost of carry), accuracy (avoiding costly mistakes), and ESG; ultimately delivering a higher quality product more quickly. Single-use case, small scope robots don’t deliver enough value to drive adoption.
Diamond Age solves a pain point for home builders in a way that no other construction startup we have seen has. The Diamond Age platform offsets 55% of the manual labor required to build a new home, using a suite of 26 end-of-arm robotic tools, reducing the construction cycle time from about 9 months to 30 days. The work that remains for humans to do is higher skill, higher-paying.
Team
I love a founder who can hire! And Jack Oslan, co-founder and CEO, is among the best. Upon closing the seed round, he and Russell Varone, co-founder and CTO, brought six founding team members from Tesla. The full-time team has now grown to 40+ and moved to Arizona. This mass migration to be closer to their early customers shows a deep commitment and cohesion.
Technology
In December 2021, I visited Diamond Age’s shop in Pleasanton, California and was blown away. I toured the 1750 square foot demo home they built in their back parking lot using their gantry system. They scaled two versions of their technology and then built the house, all in 11 months on very modest seed funding.
Traction
At its most basic you can boil things down to: are you building something that someone will pay you for? If yes, how much? How many? When? And, can you make a profit doing this? The demand for the Diamond Age product could not be more clear. They signed an MSA with a top 10 homebuilder and have a long list of additional customers vying to be on the waitlist. We are extremely excited by the value proposition of building a better product, faster, and on par with conventional costs. It also looks and feels extremely familiar to the ultimate customer — the home buyer.
We are excited to support Diamond Age in this next phase of growth. Let’s go build some houses!
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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