Foundation
Shopify for Homebuilders
Active Founders
Luke Groesbeck, Founder
Graham Place, Founder
Derek Schairer, Founder
Company Launches
Homebuilding: A huge industry that’s still offline
Homebuilding — building and selling new-construction homes — is a massive business. In the U.S., the Top 300 builders alone sell ~$250 billion worth of homes each year.
Not only is homebuilding a meaningful part of the U.S. economy, but it’s also a big part of U.S. culture (at least once you get out of Silicon Valley and NYC). In most American cities, most homeowners have either considered buying a new construction home, have already bought one, or know someone who works in or around the new construction industry.
The U.S. is also significantly underbuilt from a housing perspective — estimates suggest that we’re anywhere from 2M-6M homes short of the inventory needed to house American families. To bridge this gap, it’s going to be the big “production” builders who do much of the heavy lifting.
The opportunity: bring a massive industry online
Despite how central homebuilding is to the U.S. economy & culture, large parts of the industry run almost entirely offline. After working closely with homebuilder partners for years at Opendoor, Foundation’s founding team realized how big of an opportunity this is.
A simple question we ask: “Why do you have an app for tracking your pizza delivery, but not one for the biggest purchase of your life?” With the launch of Foundation’s buyer experience platform, this finally changes.
By bringing the home purchase and ownership experience online, Foundation’s buyer experience platform helps homebuilders sell more homes, at higher margins, to happier buyers.
Our first customers go live in Q1 2024, and the early response we’ve gotten — everyone from leading national builders who sell tens of thousands of homes a year, to forward-thinking, fast-growing regional and local builders — shows the tide is finally turning.
Hear from the founders
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
Our founding team met while working at Opendoor. Two of us (Derek &Luke) worked together on the partnerships team, which grew to become a major driver of customer acquisition at Opendoor, while Graham was one of the first people on the original version of Opendoor Mortgage. The Homebuilder business was Opendoor’s first partner channel AND first billion-dollar partner channel. As these builders got to know Opendoor, they’d get to know our products — and started wrapping their heads around how modern digital products could help them transform their businesses. We started Foundation to meet this growing demand.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
The core problem we’re solving is that today, most of the consumer experience in homebuilding is still offline. Our buyer experience platform brings homebuilders online to help them sell more homes, at higher margins, to happier home buyers. One way to think about this is to ask a question: why do you have a better app for tracking your pizza delivery than you do for the biggest purchase of your life? Almost nobody in Silicon Valley understands homebuilding in the U.S. Just the Top 300 U.S. homebuilders — what some folks call “production builders” — build and sell >$250 BILLION (with a B) worth of homes a year, and spend $10B+ on technology, customer acquisition, and commissions. These builders don’t build homes on Sand Hill Road. But once you get outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, you learn how important homebuilding is in the U.S. Yes, it’s economically important — this is a massive corner of the American economy — but homebuilding also has huge cultural significance. Go talk to someone from Texas, or Florida, or a normal midwestern city: either they’ve thought about buying a new construction home, or their friends & family have, or they know someone who works in homebuilding.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
The U.S. is underbuilt by anywhere from 2M-6M+ homes. By helping bring homebuilding online, we help builders run better businesses — and do our small part to help get more homes built for American families. Beyond the new construction industry, we believe more broadly that the entire economy is still coming online. Parts of residential real estate have resisted this, but it’s happening. Foundation has the opportunity to become the platform for homeownership — not another search portal, but an actual digitally-native checkout and ownership experience.