“Legos,” are how Alexis Rivas described what he and his cofounder Jemuel Joseph are building with Cover.

“With Legos you have a finite set of parts and you can combine those parts to create pretty much any design. At Cover we’re building life size Lego blocks for homebuilding,” Alexis explained in the 6th episode of S³.

While it’s a fun metaphor, what Cover is building is quite a bit more complicated and exciting than mere connection point panels. These “Legos” are entirely represented in custom software, and take account electrical wiring, plumbing, insolation, multi-story design, and most importantly, rapid manufacturing and assembly.

In short, Cover is trying to do for home building what Tesla did for EVs:

1. Make an initial premium product that proves its quality

2. Develop a strong manufacturing and ecosystem to make more

3. Drastically reduce the price of homes through mass manufacturing and optimized production design

Disclaimer, whenever I say homes or houses think buildings. Covers are not just limited to small backyard units or double bedroom homes, they can be made into two-story houses and multi-hundred unit apartment complexes.

Cover is not another ADU or small home manufacturer, it’s a new paradigm in home (small home, big home, apartment, building…) design and manufacturing.

Building (literally) f a s t

Cover was founded in 2014 and has since raised around $70m to date, its latest Series B round was led by Gigafund and were joined by Founders Fun and Valor Equity Partners — investors who bet big and early on SpaceX and Tesla.

In 9 years, Cover has successfully built:

• Proprietary software that handles design, manufacturing, and permitting for their buildings

• A large manufacturing facility in LA

• Over 15 finished Covers

As Alexis told me while filming, their next goal is to build 10,000 Covers.

With Cover, you are looking at the bottom of the very beginning of what will be an exponential curve of growth as they scale to production.

Combining beauty with modularity

Alexis used to work at a prefab company where he hoped to find the answer to the problem of affordable house manufacturing. He was disappointed to find that most large prefab companies build houses in factories much the way that regular houses are built, manually with 2×4 and panels.

Beyond the lack of modernizing the manufacturing, most prefabs aren’t exactly beautiful. As Architecture Majors, both Alexis and Jemuel knew they couldn’t sacrifice great design with Cover.

As someone who got to visit a Cover, and film every nook and cranny quite up close… I can assure you that they’ve made something beautiful in its own right regardless of how impressively manufactured it was.

It’s clear that Alexis and Jemuel love design and what they’re building with Cover, just watch this clip of Alexis talking about windows and you’ll see what I mean.

Thinking deep for now and the future

Speaking of clips, this one of Alexis showing me just how in depth their team thinks about things. Case and point, the average LA lot size and how to best optimize a building for that.

John Coogan does a great job going in depth on Cover’s model and future plans drastically reducing the cost of manufacturing. Recognize where he filmed? 😉 

A big thank you to Alexis and his team for making the time to film on a Saturday and agreeing to do S³ when we only had 1 episode out at the time!

Keep on building the future,

— Jason