Once a Bay Area unicorn, $1B company to fold with few houses built

Veev, a Hayward-based company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to “reimagine the home experience from the ground up,” is preparing to shut down.

Veev’s latest attempt to raise money failed “due to the macroeconomic environment,” the Bay Area startup’s spokesperson, Drew Chapman, wrote in a statement to SFGATE on Monday. He added that the house-building company would now undertake “an assignment for the benefit of creditors process,” which are bankruptcylike proceedings to liquidate a company’s assets.

The closure comes about a year and a half after Veev raised $400 million from investors, and less than two weeks after Veev CEO Amit Haller gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he gave no indication that his company would soon be going under. “There’s room for everyone, including the traditional industry, because the [housing] shortage is so serious and so real that it’s not going to be a one-company fix,” Haller said in the Nov. 16 interview, per AP.

When it announced the massive 2022 funding round, Veev told Calcalist that the investments had valued the company at at least $1 billion, the outlet reported at the time, making it a so-called “unicorn” startup. 

Veev’s plan to change house-building was focused on modular walls. The idea was that Veev would deliver each wall panel to building sites with plumbing, insulation and the company’s digital home system already inside. Then, the company’s website explains, the walls could quickly lock into place, and houses would be built without much on-site work. “To reimagine the home, we reinvented the wall,” the site reads. 

Veev’s corporate headquarters and manufacturing facility are in Hayward, California, and its research and development team is based in Israel. The company’s site currently lists “coming soon” projects in Union City and San Leandro, as well as existing buildings in Palo Alto and San Carlos. Already up are two side-by-side stand-alone houses, as well as a building with townhouses and another with condominiums. Veev’s spokesperson did not respond to SFGATE’s question about the future of the existing properties.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom used the company’s most high-profile development, housing built for homeless individuals in San Jose, as the backdrop for a press conference in October 2020. Veev had built the development’s 78 bedrooms with Habitat for Humanity, the San Jose Spotlight reported; the outlet found that the project had been riddled with delays, code citations and wage issues. City workers found that Veev hadn’t actually installed some of the electrical equipment in walls before bringing them to the site as they said they would, the outlet reported.

Still, when Veev announced its $400 million funding round in a press release last March, the company called the emergency housing project part of a “period of momentous growth.”

The Information reported that Veev’s investors are “not likely to recoup any of the $600 million” total they poured into the company. Veev additionally joins a stream of tech startups laying off workers, preparing to close or declaring bankruptcy in 2023. The company had already laid off 100 employees last November, Calcalist reported, but now will join IRL, Proterra and Bitwise in California’s tech company graveyard. The previous layoff round hit 30% of Veev’s employees, per Calcalist, meaning that as many as 245 people may lose their jobs with the closure.

Hear of anything happening at Veev or another Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.