Silicon Valley’s latest axiom: Move fast and build things. VC firms expect to invest $375 million in construction tech this year—a 420 percent increase from 2014. “It’s one of the last massive industries to be disrupted,” says Darren Bechtel, founder of Brick and Mortar Ventures (and kin to the ­founders of the eponymous construction giant). Investors like him envision streamlining a process that has traditionally required teams of contractors to build a single house.

The so-called constructech industry’s unlikely darling, Katerra, builds homes by controlling every step of the process, from fabricating walls to installing doorknobs. Despite the fact that the founders have never worked in the building industry, the startup secured a $130 million Series C round earlier this year. Katerra CEO Michael Marks, former head of Flex and Tesla, argues that it takes an outsider to shake things up: “Amazon didn’t come from within the retail industry; Airbnb didn’t come from the hospitality industry.”

Construction-software startups are seeing similar enthusiasm: Procore, which creates project-management systems for contractors, hit unicorn status in late 2016, and VCs including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures have invested nearly $40 million in Flux, a data-sharing platform tailored to architects, engineers, and contractors. Now, if only the new constructech crew could bring down the price of California real estate.

This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.