You can buy a house online—not a dollhouse or a Roblox mansion, but a real one.
And I don’t just mean look online. Right now, if you’re looking at homes in Denver, Dallas, or Houston, you can actually go buy a million-dollar home through Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilding platform founded in 2018. In some sense, the company came out of the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Northern California.
“In my backyard, 6,000 houses burned down over the course of about 48 hours,” said Nikki Pechet, CEO and cofounder of Homebound. “In the aftermath, people felt totally helpless. Even with multimillion‑dollar insurance checks in their pockets, they’d go talk to contractors who’d say, ‘Sure, I’ll put you on my waitlist. I’ll call you in four years.’”
Pechet, an early Thumbtack exec, said that she realized “the things that we were seeing in our disaster‑impacted market was actually just a microcosm of the industry… Homebuilding is totally broken and doesn’t have technology supporting it in the way many other industries do.”
Here’s how it all works: You choose a house online—one that’s already in progress or from scratch—with a lot, floor plan, and style. As you configure the home, the pricing updates in real-time. Then, it’s a checkout flow “like anything else online,” said Pechet. Homebound generates a digital twin of the house that lets buyers track progress and view AI-driven inspections. The supply chain, Pechet said, is managed to produce precise bills of materials rather than rough estimates.
“What a typical builder usually would do is send CAD files, architectural drawings to the lumber yard and say, ‘Can you send me a lumber pack for this house?’” she told Fortune. “The lumber yard uses their own measurements to figure out how much lumber you need for that house—then they’re going to add 10% or 20%, because they don’t want to be wrong… You’re adding extra materials that you don’t need, and you’re also not checking with precision.”
The company raised $75 million in its Series C in 2022 but has not provided any updates about its finances since then. Now, Homebound has revealed to Fortune that, since 2022, it’s raised a combined $400 million—$100 million for its operating company and $300 million in real estate capital. Existing investors Goldman Sachs and Magnetar doubled down, and the company raised equity funding from its major venture backers like Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, GV, Fifth Wall, Atomic, and Forerunner. New investors are also in the mix, including Neuberger Berman and Bridgepoint.
“We’ve been heads down over the last three-and-a-half years of this crazy rate hike cycle, when everybody around us died in proptech,” said Pechet. “My single biggest learning from managing through this cycle: Know what can kill you, make sure that that doesn’t happen, and do the hard work to get out the other side with a business that’s definitively working.”
Pechet said Homebound is on track to be profitable by the end of 2026. But her ambitions go well beyond the company’s current form. While realizing these ambitions would require meaningful shifts in consumer behavior, they point to a potential broader transformation in how the homes we live in come to be. Pechet said she is seeking to compete with the nation’s largest builders, including D.R. Horton, and then pushing further.
“We’ll have this end-to-end platform, [including] everything around digital orchestration of actually building the homes,” said Pechet. “We can open all of that up to third parties and allow other home builders—net new home builders, existing home builders—to operate more efficiently on the platform over time.”
The way Pechet describes this endgame: The “Amazon of homes.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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