One of e-design’s original pioneers is back. Modsy founder and serial startup entrepreneur Shanna Tellerman is launching a new venture, Geom, a software platform for the homebuilding industry. Her goal is to use AI to rapidly expedite the arduous process that lies between a home’s initial design and a full set of construction documents.
“Today, the design phase is actually relatively quick,” Tellerman tells Business of Home. “Getting the detailing where everything is dimensioned and annotated. … You have electrical, you have foundation plans. … That’s what takes weeks, sometimes even months. Those parts, in our mind, can be entirely automated.”
The concept for Geom grew out of Tellerman’s own experience in the world of production—or large-scale—homebuilders. Following Modsy’s shutdown in 2022, she spent three years at Lennar, the homebuilding giant that acquired Modsy’s IP. As chief product officer, she developed technology for the company, along the way gaining an appreciation for the challenges that go into building thousands of homes a year.
Production homebuilders struggle to get the same efficiencies of scale that, say, an auto manufacturer can attain. That’s at least partially because varied local zoning laws make it difficult to build the same home twice. As a result, a good deal of labor goes into creating construction documents for relatively small variations on the same concept—then fixing the mistakes. As the technology leapt forward, the prospect of an AI-powered solution beckoned.
“I couldn’t help but start to put all the pieces together from my prior Autodesk and Modsy experience with what I was doing in production homebuilding, and start to wonder: What if?” she says. “I couldn’t put that idea out of my mind.”
Earlier this year, she raised $5 million from a handful of investors, led by venture powerhouse Gil & Co, and hired a small (“sub 10”) team. Whether AI can drastically speed up the homebuilding process is yet to be determined, but there’s no doubt it helped supercharge Geom: Tellerman officially got to work in April of this year. Five months later, the company is launching its debut product.
Geom’s initial client base will be production homebuilders. To that end, Tellerman has been developing the platform in collaboration with a handful of companies in the field, including Pulte, Century Communities and Meritage. Down the line, she says the technology could be applied to custom homebuilding at the high end—the kinds of homes featured in Dwell and Architectural Digest—but the immediate opportunity is the scale of the production world.
“Working with dozens of production homebuilders is going to have a universal impact faster than working on lots of one-off custom homes,” she says. “I also think about the importance of the timing in the country, with the housing deficit—it’s not happening at the custom home level. It’s really about: How do we get more affordable homes starting to be built faster?”
The company’s pricing model will take a varied approach: Some customers will pay a subscription fee, others will pay onetime service costs for specific tasks, like “mirroring” (flipping the schematic design for a home on its axis, a common task for scale homebuilders).
Tellerman declined to share specific prices, but the overall financial opportunity is considerable. She pegs the value of the architecture, engineering and construction services industry at $400 billion—it’s one of the biggest service sectors outside of the legal and financial world, and Geom is certainly not the only AI-powered startup trying to grab a slice of it.
This being her third entrepreneurial adventure, Tellerman has a clear sense of what she does and doesn’t want Geom to be—at least partially informed by the trials and tribulations of Modsy. “[Modsy] was about tools that allowed interior designers to be more efficient,” she says. “The world we’re entering into here is extraordinarily familiar. … How do you make people more efficient? Give them tools they love, then provide results. The thing I think we want to avoid that was complicated with Modsy was scaling a huge services company. We’re not interested in becoming the next architecture firm enabled by AI. We’re much more interested in giving tools to architecture firms that already exist.”
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