VUILD Welcomes a Group of Entrepreneur Backers as New Shareholders to Accelerate Its Digital Home-Building Business

VUILD Inc. (“VUILD”), an architecture-tech startup aiming for the digital transformation of the housing industry using digital technology under its vision of “the democratization of architecture,” is pleased to announce that it has raised a total of just over 100 million yen through a third-party allotment of new shares to angel investors including Fumiaki Koizumi, Motoki Shiota and Masamichi Toyama, and operating companies including ANDPAD Inc., KAYAC Inc. and BIOTOPE Co., Ltd. This brings the company’s cumulative funding to approximately 500 million yen.
With this funding, VUILD will further strengthen its development and organizational structure, centered on its new business, the digital home-building platform “Nesting,” and accelerate business expansion toward realizing its vision.

● Recent business status and future plans

Founded in autumn 2017, VUILD aims to democratize the highly specialized building industry through digital technology and realize a world in which anyone can make the furniture and buildings they need for daily life with their own hands.
To build a domestic manufacturing platform for digital fabrication, VUILD has installed the US-made 3D wood-processing machine “ShopBot” at more than 80 locations across Japan (as of October 2021) and has been providing “EMARF,” a distribution platform that enables distributed, cloud-based machining of furniture and housing parts at these sites.

In May this year, VUILD announced the digital home-building platform “Nesting,” aiming for next-generation housing supply that makes full use of digital fabrication technology.
When recruitment of early users began alongside the announcement, “Nesting” drew a huge response, receiving more than 50 applications within a few days. Starting with the first house, to be completed this autumn, work has already begun on 15 projects, and the goal is to build a cumulative total of 100 houses by 2023. In addition, an app that lets users design their own homes is under development, with release targeted for this autumn.

<Construction of the first house>

● Comments from the investors

▲ Fumiaki Koizumi
What interested me most in talking with Mr. Akiyoshi was the story of how houses used to be built. The owner and the master carpenter worked hand in hand to design and build the form the owner loved, which is completely different from today’s efficient, standardized house building. The world VUILD is pursuing is to democratize this process once again, in a form suited to the present day, by making full use of technology.
What I love about technology and the internet is the empowerment of the individual, and I want to support VUILD in changing this system.

▲ Motoki Shiota
It’s great that the architecture industry is being democratized too. Just as users create and share all kinds of content on the internet, a world where everyone becomes a designer and buildings of all kinds of designs come into being is exciting. The real world looks set to become much more interesting. I want to build all sorts of buildings and play with them myself! I’m rooting for you.

▲ Masamichi Toyama
We met during the Good Design Award judging. At first I thought it was something like local-production-for-local-consumption architecture set in a regional forest, but as I learned more, I came to understand that it is the implementation of an autonomous way of living that connects the individual and society. This invention, which realizes architecture, a unit an individual cannot handle alone, through individual ideas and means, will surely give us rich opportunities to live.

▲ Takeo Inada (CEO, ANDPAD Inc.)
Although VUILD is a design group, it is a unique presence that, more than anyone, takes the user’s perspective, aspires to transformation unbound by business conventions, and races ahead with sincerity and flair. There is no shortcut to the “democratization of architecture” VUILD advocates, and I expect it to be a long and deep challenge, but through my discussions with Mr. Akiyoshi, I strongly resonate not only with the technology but also with the determination to see it through. As for its services, I am convinced that the expansion of its distributed manufacturing network will act as a centrifugal force, rapidly spreading the newly begun digital transformation of timber construction, and that VUILD will become ever more anticipated by the construction industry. We will also advance our collaboration with ANDPAD, and I look forward to it leading to VUILD’s growth and to promoting the digitalization of the construction industry.

▲ Daisuke Yanasawa (CEO, KAYAC Inc.)
Now that we can choose where to live and where to work, I think our concepts of housing and mobility will change dramatically. Travel with a 3D printer in your car, quickly put up a house wherever you like, take it down and move on again. Perhaps such a world is coming. Mr. Akiyoshi calls it “the democratization of architecture.” Architecture that lets anyone build a house is about to become reality through VUILD. At KAYAC we are working on a community currency business, and just as we are moving from a world where only central banks issue money to one where many community currencies are born, the structure of society is sure to change greatly. We want to open up a new future transformed by technology together with VUILD.

▲ Kunitake Saso (CEO, BIOTOPE Co., Ltd.)
VUILD, an architecture-tech company, has a vision of creating a society in which people acquire the ability to design their own environments using their own heads and bodies, and create their own lifestyles. This aligns perfectly with our view of future society at BIOTOPE: unleashing the creativity everyone has so that they can create stories of hope. Through jointly conceiving and supporting the digital home-building platform Nesting with VUILD, I feel that VUILD is a company that can build a platform that could become a hope for the future, one where designing eco-friendly, creative lifestyles using local forest resources balances the technology of digital fabrication with a humanity that earns grounded, down-to-earth richness. The journey to create a humane lifestyle for the next era is long, but co-creating with genuine innovators, who are turning ideas whose feasibility was once invisible into reality at tremendous speed, is an exciting and enjoyable process, and I believe we are experiencing early on a new way of enjoying life that many people will seek in the future.

● Message from the CEO: Koki Akiyoshi, CEO, VUILD Inc.

To heal the “climate change and inequality” caused by runaway capitalism by turning the power of capitalism against itself. To do so, to “decommodify” housing, which has functioned as a cog in financial capitalism. Our digital home-building business “Nesting,” which began from these two themes, has completed the framing of its first house about six months after the concept was made public, and the house will soon be completed. Our roadmap for the social transformation of democratizing architecture has steadily progressed from building the OS and platforms (ShopBot and EMARF), and we have finally reached the stage of delivering content in the form of housing (Nesting). Launched with the vision of “home building that contributes to sustainability and well-being,” Nesting has matched the needs of many people, and more than 50 groups have already expressed a wish to build. Using this funding as a run-up, we aim to supply not only the approximately 15 projects currently underway but 100 houses by 2023. It is reassuring that senior entrepreneurs who have actually changed the world have joined us as shareholders. Together with them, we will spend about six months testing hypotheses on the business side, including the business model, and then aim to further accelerate the business by conducting another large round of fundraising from next spring onward.

[VUILD Inc.]
Representative: Koki Akiyoshi (CEO)
Founded: November 21, 2017
Headquarters: unico 1F-A, 3-4 Nisshin-cho, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki, Kanagawa
Business: Architectural design, development and manufacturing of wood products, sales of CNC routers, digital talent development, business development support, IT service development
Web: https://vuild.co.jp/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vuildinc
note: https://note.com/vuild
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VUILD.co.jp/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vuild_official/