Custom home startup launching in Charlotte and the Triangle raises $12.5 million
Atmos, a home-building startup with a particular focus on Charlotte and the Triangle, raised $12.5 million in Series A funding this week as it looks to deepen its foothold in these two markets.
Founded by a team including two North Carolina State University dropouts, Atmos strives to provide clients a streamlined custom home building experience, all done online, from finding plots to designing interiors to vetting builders. Home costs typically approach $1 million, and the company currently only serves North Carolina’s two largest cities and their surrounding areas.
Launching in the Triangle and Charlotte made sense both professionally and personally, said Atmos CEO Nicholas Donahue, 24, who graduated from Durham’s Riverside High School and left N.C. State after a year in 2017. He learned the residential housing industry through his father, who built subdivisions in the Triangle for the construction firm D.R. Horton.
Beyond familiarity, Donahue said the two North Carolina regions’ growth and future prospects as tech and financial hubs make them ideal places to start. He previously had told The News & Observer his company sought to find customers in San Francisco and New York who were looking to relocate.
According to Donahue, Atmos has already constructed seven homes and is designing and building a few dozen more.
“We’re not trying to be the builders ourselves,” he said. “We’re trying to enable builders to simplify their front-end process, and bridge that gap between customers, homeowners and builders that want to do custom, making a much, much simpler, easy process for everyone involved.”
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With its latest funding round, Atmos seeks to enhance its virtual platform experience and expand in its existing markets.
“We found that people feel a lot of value in being able to actually visualize what their home becomes, and a lot of the most magical moments we have with clients are in that moment,” Donahue said. “They see their house in 3D for the first time. We’ve had people in tears when they do that.”
Atmos currently has 26 employees, and it previously raised $6 million over two rounds of seed funding. In 2020, the company participated in the prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, which reports to accept no more than 2% of startups that apply.
Past companies that have participated in the accelerator include Airbnb, Instacart and Reddit.
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.
This story was originally published November 17, 2022 at 10:10 AM.
