Diamond Age Raises $8 Million Seed Round to Advance Robotics and 3D Printing

Diamond Age, a full stack robotics startup that is automating new home construction to make home ownership more affordable, raised an $8 million seed round led by Prime Movers Lab and Alpaca VC. Additional investors include Dolby Family Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, Towerview Ventures, GFA Venture Partners and Suffolk Construction.

Using 3D printing and robotics technology, Diamond Age is building a suite of 26 end-of-arm robotic tools to offset 55% of the manual labor required to build a new home, reducing the construction cycle time from about 9 months to 30 days, the company reports.

The company is also developing additive manufacturing tools that move along a gantry system to add layers of concrete to “print” the interior and exterior walls of the house. These efficiencies could reduce the almost 7 million single-family home shortage that currently exists in the U.S. housing market.

“The affordable housing shortage is a national problem that I want to help solve because it is deeply personal to me. A few years ago, my son and daughter-in-law almost moved away from the Bay Area because of the housing shortage,” says Jack Oslan, co-founder and CEO of Diamond Age. “We need to build high-quality affordable single-family homes for the next generation striving for the American dream, and the only way we can solve this problem is with automation.”

Diamond Age will use the funding to scale its robotics platform and to produce a 1,100-square-foot demonstration house. This will help Diamond Age partner with home builders and developers to turn home building into an on-demand product and provide buyers with more options when designing their home.

“Construction is still an antiquated industry that has yet to experience the full benefit of technology; it is plagued with inefficiency and massive labor shortages,” says Prime Movers Lab General Partner Suzanne Fletcher. “Diamond Age is building a truly transformative system that will change the buying and building of new production homes forever.”

“We spent a lot of time in the 3D printing and robotic building space looking for the right team and the right go-to-market that could really become a category-changing and defining company within the real estate construction space,” says Ryan Freedman, general partner at Alpaca VC. “We identified a tremendous opportunity in the amount of efficiency there is to bring in terms of time, quality and labor to the homebuilding market.  When we met Jack & Russell, we knew this was the team with the vision and the technical expertise to change the game.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.