Steve Glenn, founder & CEO of Plant Prefab, a sustainable homebuilding startup, joined Cheddar News to discuss the company's latest funding round and business model.

Steve Glenn, founder &amp; CEO of Plant Prefab, a sustainable homebuilding startup, joined Cheddar News to discuss the company's latest funding round and business model. “We're just able to make housing happen much quicker sometimes for lower cost, super high quality, and super sustainable and overall, much more predictable,” he said.

Plant Prefab Shakes Up Homebuilding Industry

Let's take a look at another startup, shaking things up. First up, we've got the custom home startup. Plant prefab raising 42 million in a new round from investors, Western technology investments and Intel capital. While plant prefab builds itself as a building technology company dedicated to sustainable design, materials and operations. The company says its platform can help architects, developers, general contractors and individuals design and build custom housing 20-50% faster than traditional methods. Pretty impressive. So joining me now is Steve Glenn, founder and ceo of plant prefab as Steve. Thanks so much for coming on the show. How does this work well, first of all, big honor, love what you all do. Well, so we're focused on making house construction more efficient, more sustainable, um more predictable. Um construction hasn't changed a lot in the last a few 1000 years. Um Traditional site based method, we found that by developing a patented building system. Talk about building offsite currently, in a couple of factories we have, we're actually um in construction on what will be our first fully automated facility. We're just able to make housing happen much quicker sometimes for lower cost, super high quality and super sustainable and overall, much more predictable. Which is to say, you know, the budget, you know, the schedule and that's a big problem in a traditional site based approach. Okay, well, let's talk at least about the quality to begin with them. We can get to price point, we're showing a whole bunch of images of these homes steve and they look pretty sleek. I mean, they look pretty nice? Maybe not your traditional home per se, more modern and contemporary but still close to it. Is it going to give you the same quality? And how do you measure that compared to a traditional home? Yeah. Well um and first of all, I you all are are showing a lot of renderings that we've actually built over 150 homes. There was like one or two pictures of completed homes, but we've got a bunch that we've done too and it's single family and multi family want to be clear on that. You also showed kind of single family. Um so quality two answers. One is in general about the industry and one is specifically what about what we do um When you build um through an offsite method modular panel Ized, we do both. We're the only ones out there actually who do both. Um The state requires you to build to a higher building code. Why? Because during transportation, Your components are subjected to the equivalent of an 8.0 earthquake and wind shear. So the state says you have to build a tougher structure than were you doing this on site. So one reason you can get higher quality is frankly just because you're building offsite. Now we do a bunch of things to specifically ensure that we're building at a very high quality level, including a level of quality checks that really doesn't seem to happen on site? We've got jigs that allow us us to create our walls and our floors and roofs that are absolutely straight true level square to ensure super high quality construction. And now with this new facility that we're building, which as I said will be fully automated, robotic and automated production that as I'm sure you know allows you to do things at a level of precision. That's hard for humans many times to do. What is the price point steve. If someone wants to call up your company design, one of these homes haven't delivered to a plot of land. It's my understanding that is to some extent how this works. What kind of price point are they looking at? Well, so um you started by saying we didn't really describe were in the custom world, what does that mean? That means hiring an architect to do a specific project could be single family, could be multi family for specific piece of land. Where do you see this? Well, urban areas always mountain home communities. Second home communities. What do they all have in common, high land cost, high labor costs, scarce labor. And specifically with cities that's the biggest market for us. You've got odd sized lots that can vary neighborhood to neighborhood zoning setbacks and height limits. You can vary neighborhood to neighborhood. So whether you're an individual doing your own home and say west Hollywood or Palo Alto or you're a developer doing a 50 story apartment project in downtown L. A. Or in south of market san Francisco you're hiring an architect to figure out how can I, what can I create in this specific property? It's a custom project, it's based on those uh kind of constraints and that market has not been the market for prefab prefab this country. Um frankly mobile homes, that's the biggest um that's been the biggest market today. They're standard homes, frankly they tend to be lower quality, lower cost. Um We're one of the first to say let's look at the custom home market um make that more efficient and so and sorry for the long background, I'm gonna answer your question now, cost based is based on what are you doing? Uh 90 Yeah. Give us a range of projects or 30 our third party architects projects we've done range in cost and I mean fully installed. So we don't do the site were somewhere between 2 50 to 507 $100. A square foot. Big range, interesting. Okay, steve. My final question to you very quickly because we're running tight on time is how many orders are in the pipeline? We've got a huge backlog, 80,000,000 plus 600 million in prospects. There's a lot of work out there and um we're we we are a b corp we're trying to wed profit and purpose in addition to creating a more efficient solution to housing which this country really needs. Obviously it's a big imbalance between demand and supply were also building in a much more sustainable way and a much healthier way. Alright, steve Glenn, very cool. Come back on the show. We'd love to have You. Steve is the founder and Ceo of Plant Prefab.