2023 Pitchfest: Highlight Reel

Listen in for a snapshot from each of our 2023 Pitchfest finalists! At the 2023 Housing Innovation Summit, we introduced a new program, coined: Pitchfest in order to bring new ideas to light, offer feedback that startups can use to advance their solutions, and introduce these innovators to potential advisors, partners, investors, and clients.

A dozen companies made it to the final round, and four came out on top.

In this episode, you'll hear from...

Mohsen Zehtabchian, Amatec
Cliff Fetner, Soil Connect
Jim Scott, StructureBot
Robert Benjamin and Helene Cornell, Aris Hydronics
Sameer Sood, FwdSlash
Derek Cowburn, LumenCache
Needham Hurst, Up&Up
Eric Law, Urban Machine
Paul Cardis, On3
Tomas Garcia, Arx
Branka Minic, Jobs to Build
Jordan Wojtowecz, TraceAir

Read more about Pitchfest and the Housing Innovation Summit. 

Transcript

Haley Baumeister (00:00):

Welcome to the Housing Innovation Alliance podcast. This episode features our 12 finalists from a new event we introduced this year at the 2023 Housing Innovation Summit, coined Pitch Fest. We introduced this event in order to bring new ideas to light, offer feedback that startups can use to advance their solutions and introduced these, these innovators to potential advisors, partners, investors, and clients. The competition was broke out into three categories, design and build, e, SS, G and Tech and Data. A winner was crowned in each of these three categories and a People's Choice winner was named as well. We'd like this episode to highlight each of the finalists in each of the three categories. Each finalist will introduce themselves and provide an overview of the company they represent. You'll hear snippets from each of their final pitches. At Pitch Fest, we'll go category by category, beginning with design and build. I'll reveal the winner at the end of each category. First in design and build, you'll hear from Mosen representing Amtech Technologies.

Mosen (01:00):

I'm Mosen the c e o and Co-founder. We also have two incredible advisors whom some of you may recognize as a result of their great contributions to the space of construction. Additionally, we have a team of highly experienced engineers working with us. What is Amtech offering to the housing construction industry? We at Amtech created a technology that allows us to produce custom panels at a record breaking speed and level of affordability without any manual labor. We also created a technology that allows us to convert regular gypsum into a structural material that's actually stronger and more reliable than even standard structural concrete. What's really special about it? Well, the answer is that it can be pretty much molded into anything your heart desires and then it turns into a rock solid stone within 10 to 15 minutes. It's also worth mentioning that this panel is completely fireproof, waterproof, airtight, and vapor resistant.

Haley Baumeister (02:00):

Next, here's Cliff Fetner from Soil Connect.

Cliff Fetner (02:03):

Good morning everybody. Just a quick thank you to housing innovation for this opportunity. Appreciate it. We're a total soil management solution, resourcing, moving, tracking, and coming soon logistics. Our mission statement, very simple one, stop shopping for any and all your dirt needs. We want to be the single source of truth for all your earth movements. We have our marketplace. We're no different than Airbnb and Craigslist and Zillow and apartments.com and all those sites. I'm just using dirt and aggregates on my site. So what are we doing? We're making it quicker, faster, and cheaper to resource and move your dirt. Maybe the most significant thing we do is we create closer connection and by creating those closer connections, what are we doing? We're saving money because everybody in this room knows it's the cost of moving the dirt and the aggregates and the compost up and down the freeway. That's the expensive part of it. So if I can find you a closer connection, then you're saving money, you're saving fuel, you're saving the environment, saving you money. But my favorite one-liner is just think of me as a dating app for DUR.

Haley Baumeister (03:12):

Last, here's Jim Scott from Structure Bot.

Jim Scott (03:15):

I'm Jim Scott, c e o and Structure Bot Republic Benefit Corporation focused on applying robotics technology to the construction process and our near hard hope is to work with people that wanna work on affordable and attainable housing. What we do is provide a robotic system that not only it's operating off of the BIM geometry kernel and then it goes through the system and generates layers of concrete or other cementitious materials. As we move forward to get away from cement, it reduces job site waste. Our initial customer's gonna be an innovative home builder, focused on affordability, is doing maybe 40 units a year or more faster build time, lowered costs for moving forward and scaling our printers. So we can do a house in El Paso County with an A D U behind it. I believe the house is gonna be about 1500 square feet and the A D U will be about 400 square feet. Our go to market approach is initially penetrating the residential builder community. We'll use that press promotion that comes from that to build pipeline and doing digital marketing and partnerships. And as we go forward, we'll most likely outsourcing, manufacturing, and we will just scale internationally as we go. 'cause Such a huge chunk of this industry is gonna be outside of the us.

Haley Baumeister (04:23):

The winner of this category was Soil Connect, represented by Cliff Fetner. Congratulations. Next. Here are the finalists who competed in the E S G category. First, you'll hear from Robert Benjamin representing Aris Hydronics. Hi

Robert Benjamin (04:40):

Everybody. I am Robert Benjamin, founder and c e o of Aris Hydronics.

Speaker 6 (04:43):

Hi everyone. Thanks for having us. I'm Helene Cornell, co-founder and chief growth officer. Aris Hydronics is a premier home comfort brand. We believe every family should be afforded the ability to keep their home comfortable, livable and safe, while not inadvertently contributing to a more unlivable planet.

Robert Benjamin (05:02):

Aris is an advance combi system for heating, cooling, and hot water, and it is appropriate for all climate zones, all building types, and for retrofit and new build.

Speaker 6 (05:12):

The A system is a direct replacement for all of the dirty thermal appliances currently in the majority of households today,

Robert Benjamin (05:20):

The A system comes with many advantages in design and performance and can save homeowners an average of 45% on their energy bills. Aris Hydronics is breaking free of old H V A C sales and distribution models so that we can better support our products in the market as well as give homeowners and builders a more enjoyable buying and installation experience. Next,

Haley Baumeister (05:43):

Here's Sameer Sood from forward slash we are

Sameer Sood (05:45):

Forward slash we are increasing the affordable housing supply through health. Here's our team. So we have Josh, he's a public health expert, Jeremy, he's been in affordable housing for 20 years and myself, I'm a physician in primary care and family medicine and health innovation. For the last 10, there's not enough housing units to start with. There's a shortage of 7.3 million affordable housing units in this country. Landlords don't really trust this population up to 91%. Some communities reject housing vouchers and homelessness. Organizations that run supportive service programming are underfunded. We handle the housing piece by acquiring, developing or master leasing housing units from local landlords and paying for rent using their HUD vouchers. We also work with the Medicaid organizations that cover the high costs from Steve of our patient and subcontract those dollars out to these local organizations for their supportive services. In West Virginia where we're starting out, this is our first contract here.

Sameer Sood (06:33):

We are attempting to house 140 members over the next five years in contract with a healthcare plan called UniCare. They are identifying members who are of high hospital visits and are housing insecure, homeless and referring them to us. When they get referred to us, we immediately place them in one of our housing units on a master lease negotiated from local landlords backed by HUD vouchers. We then refer them to our community partners who runs the supportive services. We help with evaluation and after about six to 18 months, these individuals graduate this program with stability, dignity in over five years and all 140 members, $2.2 million of healthcare cost savings.

Haley Baumeister (07:05):

Next, here's Derek Cowburn from Lumen Cash.

Derek Cowburn (07:09):

Hey, welcome to Denver. Thank you very much for the Housing Innovation Alliance. This is a great audience for what we're doing because I think most builders install lights. So I'm Derek Coburn with Looming Cash and I wanna talk with you a little bit about the future in the next decade. We're looking at a radical amount of materials that are required for all the construction that's going on. Copper is a major issue. You know, heavy copper wires are used to all the lights. That's about 60% of the copper used in the house for wiring, and they don't need it anymore. L e d lights sip energy. There's no reason to run that kind of heavy copper. So we use low voltage cat five wire out to the lights, down to the switches, exhaust fans, anything under 60 watts. We put a panel right next to your electrical panel. Typically we convert one time from AC to dc, saves about 20% for power factor alone, and then now you can have sensors in there and there's lots of companies that are doing this type of low voltage system. Light fixture companies can get rid of their AC driver, attach our smart interface block and go from there. So the fixtures are the same, the switches are the same. Sparky's happy because this is so much faster to install. We'd like to say that Looming Cash is a smart power platform that enables the most brilliant energy solutions.

Haley Baumeister (08:18):

Next, here's Needham Hurst from Up and Up.

Needham Hurst (08:20):

Hi everyone, my name's Needham. I'm the c o O of Up and Up. At Up and Up. Our goal is to help renters build wealth with us. Our renters share in the profits and appreciation of the homes that they rent. What is up and up? It's a single family rental platform designed with two goals. One, how can we address wealth and equality for low and moderate income families? Two, how can we leverage aligned incentives to create a more profitable single family investment product? So what do we do? We raise capital from pensions, endowments, high net worth individuals. We buy homes, we find renters who wanna rent differently and we share with them in the profits of the investments we're making through our fractional ownership technology. So I'm gonna walk through a story. One of our principles is that Sam and our investor, the majority owner of the home should make the same returns. So if you know pension A makes a 28% i r r, which is what we're making, then the customer should make a 28% i r r just on their relative stakes. We want to change the way we rent in the United States.

Haley Baumeister (09:23):

Finally, here's from Eric Law representing Urban Machine. Good

Eric Law (09:28):

Afternoon everyone. My name's Eric Law. I'm the co-founder and c e O of Urban Machine. We are on a mission to convert the 37 million tons of wood waste every year into premium lumber products. So every year here in the United States, the construction demolition industry throws away 37 million tons of dimensional lumber. So that's two by fours, two by six. To put that in perspective, that's about half of what we log from our soft wood. US wood has a tremendous amount of green benefits with storing carbon to begin with. It's a natural product, it's a very strong product, but unfortunately at the end of its life it goes to landfills and a little bit to incineration. And so the goal of what we're doing at Urban Machine is to close that loop. We wanna take that wood from construction and demolition and we want to turn it back into a product that can be used.

Eric Law (10:08):

The other great thing about Wood is it's a beautiful product and it has a story to go with it. The cool thing that we can do with wood that you can't do with steel and concrete is we can actually track that story and embed that on the wood with a QR code. So at Urban Machine, we're building robotics to reclaim that lumber. So imagine taking a large commercial building that a contractor's taking down and you feed that wood directly into our machines and out the other end comes lumber, no metal in it, and then we ship that on flatbeds off to our customers.

Haley Baumeister (10:33):

The winner of this category was Forward slash, which was represented by Samir Sud. Congratulations. Another congratulations goes to Urban Machine, which was represented by Eric Law. They won the People's Choice Award. Finally, here are the finalists who competed in the tech and data category. First, you'll hear from Paul Cardis representing on three Great

Paul Cardis (10:58):

To be here. We're a leading learning and task support technology serving frontline workers. Our idea is those who work on their feet or work out of a truck are really underserved by technology in terms of what they do, their job tasks. All of that really isn't well documented. In fact, we're still doing things the way we did a hundred plus years ago, which is basically apprenticeship training and live training. How do we train people on the job? How do we support them in the job? And we take a micro-learning approach. How do we capture the 30 seconds of how to do this task or the 45 seconds of how to do another task and stack up hundreds to thousands of these little mini essential modules and creating a platform to serve that? And we use AI to serve it up. So basically we can pulse employees on a Monday morning.

Paul Cardis (11:41):

They get three questions regarding safety and for those who get all the questions right, they're able to go about their day fine for those who didn't get 'em. All right, the AI system will detect what areas of weakness that employee needs some remediation. We also use AI for our V two iteration, which is utilizing this device here to provide field assistance so they can get live support so they can say, Hey on three, how many anchor bolts are needed in this location on the foundation? Or what's the nail pattern on the sheathing? And be able to get answers real time that is exact to their location and to the jobs.

Haley Baumeister (12:12):

Next, here's Tomas Garcia representing arcs.

Tomas Garcia (12:16):

What do we all wish we had more of when it comes to real estate capital and what is capital but time? How much time do you spend sourcing and diligent potential investment and development projects too much? I'm Temas Garcia, co-founder and c e o of arcs. A RX is an AI driven SaaS platform that helps our clients answer not just the question of what is the highest and best use of this property, but what is the highest and best use of my capital and my time across the entire real estate market? Period. That's a pretty big question. We're not going to underwrite every single future scenario for every single property by hand because well, that would take years, but what if it didn't? What if it took seconds? What if we wanted to quite literally search the future and identify every single property in Los Angeles that supports for sale single family infill development projects with a minimum return of 15% that require no more than a million dollars of cash and that could be completed in less than 20 months. There are the 2,708 properties that meet our exact underwriting criteria in seconds, not years. Arcs is currently live in the select markets of Los Angeles and Seattle supporting residential infill development, but we're just getting started. Soon you'll be able to analyze every residential property in every major metro area for its infill development potential, its renovation potential, as well as its rental potential.

Haley Baumeister (13:41):

Next, here's Brinka Minic representing jobs to build.

Branka Minic (13:45):

Okay, good afternoon everybody. My name is Brian Ka Minnich like spinach. I'm the c e O of Building Talent Foundation and I'm going to talk about how we are going to attack the talent problems in housing. Our industry doesn't have a sustainable workforce and you cannot have a sustainable business unless your workforce is sustainable. Our housing is also suffering from P M s. Our workforce is pale male and still there is a tremendous lack of diversity. We need to fix this. Even if we wanna get rid of manual labor, the skills content will change, but we still need people. What is Jobs to build? It is a career exploration platform. 30 different career pathways that are localized gives you information about those careers in your own city and state. It is a job board. We are a non-profit. We are funded by the industry and I hate the word non-profit. We are not for our own profit, we are for your profit.

Haley Baumeister (14:47):

Last here's from Jordan Wojtowecz representing Trace Air.

Jordan Wojtowecz (14:51):

Hi everyone. My name is Jordan Wojtowecz. I'm an account executive here at Trace Air. I'm gonna kick us off with a short video. We'll get into it.

Speaker 15 (15:00):

Traditional surveying is slow and costly, infrequent data checkpoints. Leave little room for course correction. If there are problems like dirt busts, unjustified change orders, or moving dirt twice that impact your budget and schedule. Trace Air makes this all much simpler with our cloud-based platform and drone services, which survey 100 acres in less than an hour. The three D model has a topographical accuracy within one 10th of a foot and is available the day after the flyover. Do everything you need, check pad, elevations, measure stockpiles, dirt, balance, and overlay your line. Work to compare as-built with. As designed.

Jordan Wojtowecz (15:42):

How do we empower land development teams? We are completely turnkey, so we go out, collect the site data, process that overnight at a three centimeters accuracy and then it's available in a powerful yet very simple to use platform for the entire team.

Haley Baumeister (15:59):

The winner of this category was on three, which was represented by Paul Cardis. Congratulations. Thank you for listening to the Housing Innovation Alliance podcast. We invite you to learn more about Pitch Fest and let us know if you are interested in participating in the next cohort@housinginnovationsummit.com.