An inside look at $95M homebuilding Series C and a micro-mobility IPO

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Fly on the Wall

Two milestones this week. First, Lime went public on the Nasdaq—our 10th portfolio company to IPO. I'll skip the victory lap: micromobility was one of the most punishing categories of the past decade, a business that burned through something like $10B and buried most of its entrants—Bird, Spin, Ofo, Superpedestrian… We backed Lime in 2018 and doubled down in the depths of COVID, when many others were walking away. It survived to become the clear global leader—cash-generative, across 230-plus cities. Not a moonshot return, but a hard-won one. But why, you may be asking, did we underwrite a micromobility company? Because if you look closer, it’s a real estate company. Transportation has always been the hidden hand that informs what a location is worth—from the streetcar to the automobile to the Metro stop outside your dream apartment. Now, Higharc, which closed a Series C this week, doesn't look like your typical real estate company at first either. Take a closer look.

–Brendan Wallace,
Founder, CEO & CIO

The housing shortage’s data problem and the $95M bet to fix it

Higharc’s co-founder went looking for a home and found the data layer homebuilding has never had. He’s just closed a $95M Series C to put that discovery to work.

Fifth Wall portfolio company Higharc raised a $95M Series C this week and signed a partnership with US LBM, the country’s largest privately owned distributor of lumber and building materials. Co-founder Marc Minor started the company because building a home is a process that’s both painful and inefficient, even though the country needs millions more of them. This round pushes Higharc's central idea—model a home first as data, and then generate everything downstream from there—into the supply chain.

“Housing has been working with the same software since the ‘80s—AutoCAD—and there’s this core challenge where nobody has data,” Marc told Brendan this week. “Houses are just drawings, and those drawings are just geometry: points and lines on planes.” No data, and no foundation for anything modern, AI included.

Before starting Higharc, Marc ran marketing in the world of 3D printing—companies that revolved around the concept of the digital twin, where you model a product completely and let simulation drive the design before even beginning to crank out anything physical.

Then, he tried to build his own home. “I fell flat on my face,” he recalls. He spent “a lot of cash working with a disconnected group of people who were doing their best, but treated my project like a work of art, as opposed to a product.” He was looking for the latter. Because products scale. He thought housing could work the way manufacturing does: model the home as data first, make the decisions up front, and build from that. A repeatable product instead of a bespoke one.

⬆️ Watch the video here.

“Every house that gets built changes probably a thousand times along the way,” Marc says, from materials, layout, code, etcetera, varying jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It’s that constant change, he says, that’s “the real enemy” when it comes to tackling the U.S. housing supply and affordability crisis. Each change forces another round of handoffs, where every team is redrawing the same house.

Higharc generates each home as a single 3D data model, live on the web, then produces everything downstream from it—real-time material estimates and configurable 3D views that buyers can price and edit as they need. Change one thing and every team’s version updates in sync. Compare that to the old model, where at each new phase, you have a team redrawing the house, much less measuring a floor plan with a ruler.

The hard part is teaching AI to read a building as language instead of seeing it as a picture. Higharc built its own domain model and ontology for this, Marc says. "We're effectively tokenizing the building," he notes, paired with a geometry kernel that generates buildings from code and keeps the AI's output in bounds. "LLMs work with language. LLMs don't work with geometry," he says, and the margins leave no room for error: "We're a pretty thin-margin business, relatively speaking, so errors due to AI models are a non-starter."

The end of the process is the hardest part: Automation can get a project 80% of the way to something that looks about right, but "that final 20% is like 150% of the effort.”

US LBM takes in more than 100,000 home plans a year, each needing its own estimate. Higharc’s model reads images of those plans and spits back a full 3D model mapped to US LBM’s own costs. This Series C will enable Marc and his team to reach the roughly 45,000 small homebuilders he wants to give design and estimating tools they could never hire for—what he calls “big small businesses.”

We put ~$15.3M into Higharc across three tranches, including a convertible note that marked up before this round closed. As Brendan told Marc on the day of the raise, the financing is “such a validation of that vision.” Whoever turns the house into data will own what gets built on top of it.

📹 Get the scoop on the Lime IPO ⬇️

Quick Take

“Housing has been working with the same software since the ’80s—AutoCAD—and there’s this core challenge where nobody has data. Houses are just drawings, and those drawings are just geometry: points and lines on planes. Whenever we have great new technology like AI, you can’t really do a lot with it, because you don’t actually have data.”

– Marc Minor, Co-founder & CEO, Higharc

Moves & Momentum

Green light. Lime, the Uber-backed scooter and e-bike operator, raised $174M in its Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, for a market value near $1.6B, about triple its $510M valuation in Uber's 2020 round. And it priced at $25 a share, the midpoint of its range. This IPO shows how the unit economics finally hold: Lime cleared $104M in free cash flow last year—for the third year straight—and stretched vehicle useful life to five years, something the flameouts couldn’t pull off.
Dark stores. Walmart is piloting Spark Delivery Depots inside ~20,000-square-foot shuttered Walgreens and Rite Aid box stores, stocked with the 20% of inventory that drives 80% of nearby sales and tied to the closest supercenter. The play is speed: 36% of U.S. e-commerce orders arrived in under three hours in Q1 2026 as online sales grew 25% year over year. With 4,600 stores, Walmart is converting proximity into a delivery edge rooted in real estate other sellers can’t easily copy.
“Zillow for money launderers.” The Tax Justice Network ranked the U.S. first out of 141 countries for real estate money laundering, the phrase belonging to the group’s CEO, Alex Cobham. The setup is structural: U.S. property carries lighter due diligence and reporting rules than bank accounts, and an estimated $2.3B moved through U.S. real estate deals from 2015 to 2020, 30% of it commercial. Enforcement is loosening, too—Treasury stopped enforcing the Corporate Transparency Act in 2025, and a federal judge blocked a rule unmasking all-cash buyers. Cheap secrecy is its own asset class.
Short supply. Data center construction keeps breaking records and still trails demand—capacity under development across the 16 largest markets rose 25% year over year, yet vacancy keeps falling and rents keep climbing. CBRE pins the bottleneck on power availability and local opposition rather than capital or willingness to build. For investors, the squeeze is the opportunity—tight space supports pricing—but the constraint is physical, and it sits upstream of every lease. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee opened debate on the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require data center developers to pay for the grid upgrades their projects demand.
Tapping the brakes. Texas is on track to become the top U.S. data center market by 2030, yet Gov. Greg Abbott wants guardrails after the state’s sales tax exemption is projected to forgo nearly $8B in revenue over that span. His June letter to regulators sought smaller tax breaks, called for unused power to be returned to the grid, and insisted on water and electricity reporting. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Oracle’s $3.5B Stargate campus in Abilene secured an 85% local break. Even the most build-friendly states are now pricing in the tradeoffs.
The bill comes due. Brokerages racing to wire AI into daily work are finding the return disappointing so far, as token-based pricing turns heavy usage into an unpredictable operating cost. Dealpath’s Gary Kao notes that “build-versus-buy” is very clean-cut when tokens cost nothing—and far murkier once they don’t. JLL has put $445M into roughly 60 startups since 2017 through its Spark arm, a sign the majors still expect the payoff to arrive, even as the near-term math is a bit messy.
Dome bets. Sony Pictures is putting $100M into Cosm for a minority stake, leading the immersive-venue company’s Series C and adding CEO Ravi Ahuja to its board. Cosm runs three arenas of curved screens and stadium seating with two more under construction, backfilling exactly the big-box space department stores left behind. JLL clocks experiential retail up 246% since 2023—evidence that “go somewhere you can’t stream” is becoming its own real estate category.
Prologis circles Segro. The world’s largest logistics REIT Prologis made a £12.6B all-share approach for Segro that the UK landlord rejected on June 23 as falling well short, despite a 24.6% premium. Under the UK Takeover Code, Prologis has until July 22 to table a firm offer or step back. The prize is Segro’s European development and data center pipeline—and the bid marks where consolidation pressure in industrial and digital infrastructure is pointing.
Rent freeze. For stabilized portfolios, the math on capital spending just changed. New York’s Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on one- and two-year stabilized leases—the first two-year freeze on record—covering roughly 1 million apartments, a centerpiece of Mamdani’s agenda. Owners point to board staff data showing operating costs up 5.3% over the past year and warn of deferred maintenance; one industry board member resigned in protest. Litigation looks likely.
Hanging on. Global AI revenue outside China reached $25B in the first quarter, topping the industry’s roughly $21B in depreciation for a second straight quarter, per an Exponential View analysis. Revenue now clears the cost of the hardware, but only barely, with depreciation eating more than two thirds of sales. Hyperscalers are planning for as much as $725B in capex this year, so the margin for error is thin, while every percentage point of utilization goes toward data center demand.
Power house. Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home agreed to deliver more than 16GW of flexible capacity to utilities and data centers by networking hundreds of thousands of home batteries with 8 million smart thermostats. More than 300MW is ready now in Virginia, the densest data center market on Earth, with a path to 500MW by 2030. A Brattle analysis pegs the savings at $110B to $170B against building equivalent plants.
Housing in limbo. Hours before the signing, Trump canceled the ceremony for the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, tying his signature to passage of the SAVE America Act’s voter-ID provisions. The housing bill cleared Congress with rare bipartisan force—358-32 in the House, 85-5 in the Senate—and would streamline homebuilding while capping large investors at 350 single-family homes. Speaker Johnson expects a signature before the 10-day window lapses. The supply-side win is there; the politics around it are now the variable.
Job-cut playbook. Software that books tours and answers residents now doubles as a downsizing roadmap: A 262-page manual from EliseAI is circulating among multifamily operators, walking them step-by-step from automating administration to leasing, to trimming payroll, to managing the message to staff along the way. About 60% of the leasing process already runs through EliseAI, and Equity Residential, the $25B REIT, has cut headcount 20% since 2020 by automating some work. The efficiency is measurable, as is the question of who absorbs the displacement.
Pylon adds Truv. Portfolio company Pylon wired Truv’s real-time income and employment verification into its autonomous mortgage origination, clearing one of the slowest steps on the path to instant conditional approval. Truv carries Fannie Mae D1C and Freddie Mac AIM approval, so lenders building on Pylon can verify borrowers as the file moves. Pylon says its originations price 75 to 200 basis points better than the market at a cost to originate 74% below the industry average, and those numbers improve as more of the workflow automates.
Widening the map. Bilt added Preferred Hotels & Resorts’ I Prefer program as a transfer partner, letting members move points 1:2 into more than 700 independent hotels across 85 countries—its 24th travel partner and seventh in hotels, always offering new reasons to route housing payments through Bilt, across a network now spanning 6.5 million homes.
Opendoor’s next bet. Opendoor named Vu Tran, hired out of Meta’s AI division, as its first chief AI officer—the clearest sign yet that CEO Kaz Nejatian is rebuilding the iBuyer around automated pricing and underwriting. Investors liked the direction: Shares climbed 5% on June 24 amid a refinancing-driven housing rebound. First-quarter revenue reached $720M, homes purchased rose 45% quarter over quarter to 2,474, and gross margin widened to 10%, up from 8.6% a year earlier. “The machine is working,” Nejatian said.
Foundation poured. Higharc closed a $95M Series C led by Insight Partners, with participation from Wellington Management and returning backer Fifth Wall—nearly double its $53M Series B from 2024, and enough to push total funding past $170M. The up round lands in a selective venture market where few homebuilding-tech companies command checks this size, a signal that capital increasingly treats AI for residential construction as core infrastructure rather than a niche bet.

New Reads

Brendan is launching a Substack—a place for his takes on AI, policy, the built world, and more, off the clock. Be the first to get it in your inbox: Subscribe here.

What We're Looking At

Scale or specialize. Brokerage is resolving into two workable models: national platforms with the capital and tech to out-scale everyone, and small firms that own one market and the relationships in it. The generalist middle, built on being decent at all of it, has the least defensible ground. We’re watching whether mid-market operators commit to a single sharp identity or become acquisition fuel.
ROI reckoning. The industry spent two years asking whether to adopt AI. The new question is whether it pays. Usage-based pricing has turned enthusiastic adoption into a runaway operating line, and the firms seeing real returns are the ones that redesigned a workflow, not the ones that bought a tool. We’re watching where proof, not pilots, separates the field.
Bad weather. Severe weather is now the leading cause of loss in at least one major insurer’s data center construction portfolio, and most of the capacity being built sits in markets exposed to climate hazards. The build-out is racing into hotter, storm-prone frontier geographies just as cooling becomes the costliest variable. We’re watching whether climate underwriting starts to set the map for compute.

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