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Growing up in Section-8 housing and teaching homeless students during Teach for America, Alexandria became passionate about solving the housing crisis. She starts New Story to build homes for low-income families faster, cheaper, and at scale.
New Story becomes one of the few non-profits ever accepted into Y Combinator. Since then, it has raised over $100 million and is on track to provide housing for more than one million people. The organization has been recognized four times by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.
She does deep research into solutions that can help her build more effectively and narrows in on additive manufacturing. The research leads to a connection and eventual deep partnership with 3D printing company, ICON.
Research would later become a defining part of Hometeam Ventures’ culture and approach. Learn more about our research fellowship here.
New Story and ICON co-develop and build a community of homes in Southeast Mexico. Alexandria invests in ICON, now valued at over $2B. AppleTV+ comes to record a docuseries episode about this project. The project gets over 2 billion press impressions and Alexandria is flooded with inbound messages from founders and innovators building technology for the construction industry. Watch the episode
She invites these founders to test and experiment in New Story communities. Founders love this because they get an early opportunity to test and iterate in a real-world setting with feedback. Alexandria learns what technology works, what doesn’t, and why. Founders tell her that there are almost no venture capital allocators with experience in construction, especially at the early stage. Alexandria finds it hard to ignore this gap.
We speak to over 100 housing and construction stakeholders from policy makers, to construction executives to bankers, and tradesmen wearing hard hats.
Three takeaways that inspire the formation of Hometeam Venture:
1. The construction industry—long known as a technology laggard—is finally ready for its overdue digital transformation. A convergence of tailwinds has made this a generational moment to investing one of the world’s most critical sectors.
2. While late-stage investors and platforms are starting to take notice, few allocators have the depth of experience needed to confidently invest at the earliest stages.
3. The construction industry is perhaps the most powerful lever we have to address two of our greatest global challenges: housing affordability and climate change.
This fund is purpose-built to back the founders modernizing how we build—and who gets to benefit from it.
