This startup wants to help people move from San Francisco to places like Raleigh
In a different world, Nick Donahue would have just graduated from N.C. State University with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Instead of virtually crossing the graduation stage, though, Donahue was busy raising $2 million for his startup, which is part of the most recent class of companies at the prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator.
And while he may have left North Carolina for California, his young company considers the Triangle an important bellwether of its viability.
Donahue dropped out of N.C. State in 2017 to move to California and enter the Bay Area startup world. The Durham native said he made the decision after interning at Dell and realizing he didn’t want to be stuck at a large tech company for the next 40 years of his life.
Instead, he wanted the freedom of working on his own ideas. It helped that he had recently made a small fortune selling cryptocurrencies, giving him enough money to jet off for California.
When he arrived in San Francisco, he focused on creating virtual reality headsets and making art installations for Burning Man, a heady art and music gathering popular with techies in the Bay Area.
But now Donahue, 22, is taking on the construction industry with his new startup, Atmos, which aims to streamline the process of building new homes. It’s not an industry he is completely unfamiliar with — his father built subdivisions in the Triangle for D.R. Horton.
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The goal: to create a platform that simplifies into just a few clicks the complicated process of buying land, picking a floor plan and finding a builder.
Donahue believes the U.S. is on the cusp of a massive exodus away from markets like San Francisco and New York to places like North Carolina and Texas, as middle-aged millennials flee high living costs and crowded cities.
“In (Silicon) Valley, you live in a shoe box but you are paying the same price as a massive home somewhere else,” Donahue said in an interview. “The value there is the people, but everyone is feeling the pain because ... you can’t meet up and exchange ideas. You do it over Zoom, but you can do that anywhere.”
Already, companies like Facebook and Twitter are letting their employees choose to work remotely. Many of these employees, Donahue believes, will eventually move away. When they do move, many will be interested in building homes for themselves elsewhere, which is where Atmos comes in.
Atmos would allow a user to find available lots, design a custom home and find a builder all within one platform rather than trying to navigate multiple sources. A project manager would also be assigned to the user and take care of the day-to-day complexities of getting a home built.
The startup makes money by taking a service fee from the user and a fee from the builder for connecting them with a client.
As of now, the platform is only available to people looking to build in the Triangle or Charlotte. Donahue said those metro areas are attractive because Raleigh is “one of the fastest-growing tech cities in the nation ... and Charlotte is one of the largest financial hubs outside of New York and San Francisco.”
Donahue hopes to prove the Atmos business model here over the next year, and if it is successful in North Carolina’s competitive real estate markets, he will try it in other fast-growing Sunbelt cities, like Austin and Atlanta.
Ali Yahya, who is a remote security engineer for a technology company, is using Atmos to help build a home outside of Chapel Hill. Yahya grew up in the Triangle and recently moved back to North Carolina from San Francisco after growing tired of his two-hour commute and the hassles of living in a large city.
He said that as someone who knows nearly nothing about the home building process, the platform has really simplified it for him. He’s currently picking a floor plan and finding a builder, and he likes that he just has one point of contact, rather than dealing individually with several different companies.
Simplicity “was definitely the biggest draw,” Yahya, 36, said. “Unless you are knowledgeable about construction or the home-buying process, it is a little daunting.”
Donahue said the startup has a few projects underway in the Triangle, but is still very much in the early phases of getting off the ground. Donahue hopes to use the new funding to expand the company’s remote workforce and ink partnerships with some large home builders.
Eventually, Donahue hopes to expand Atmos into creating artificial intelligence systems for custom-built homes. Smart homes of the future, Donahue said, will have a central “brain” controlling automated tasks rather than “a bunch of ad-hoc devices added on.”
“We are starting with this managed market place, but long term, we want to re-imagine what a home is,” he said.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
