Bay Area-based Diamond Age this week announced that it has raised $8 million. The seed round is led by Prime Movers Lab and Alpaca VC and features a slew of additional firms, including Dolby Family Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, Towerview Ventures, GFA Venture Partners and Suffolk Construction.
The startup looks to put a slew of key emerging technologies to work in service of building houses with fewer workers in a significantly truncated time frame. Diamond Age claims that when, fully realized, its tech will be able to reduce manual human labor by 55% and shrink the construction time on a single family home from nine months to 30 days. Part of this funding will go toward putting the processes in place to construct a 1,100-square-foot “demonstration house” as proof of concept.
“We need to build high-quality affordable single-family homes for the next generation striving for the American dream,” co-founder and CEO Jack Oslan said in a release, “and the only way we can solve this problem is with automation.”
Specifically, the company relies on robotic and 3D printing solutions. The former involves a set of 26 different robotic arm attachments to assist with the construction. That tech is coupled with a gantry-based 3D printing technology designed to construct interior and exterior walls for the structure.
Specifically, the company is looking to target the housing crunch in its Bay Area backyard. The systems will be available to construction companies through a RaaS (robotics as a service) rental model. Pricing specifics for the system have not been revealed.
