homebuilding
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Ron Nelson Is Turning Homebuilder Marketing Into a Measurable Craft
After three decades in New York advertising, Ron Nelson moved inside the business he knew best. At K. Hovnanian, his brief is deceptively simple: make a regional, high-stakes purchase feel coherent, personal and measurable.
Rachel Eaton Built a Marketing Machine, One Measured Lead at a Time
She started in a community information center and learned the business close to the customer. Two decades later, Rachel Eaton still treats marketing as an operating system - measured, repeatable and built to move buyers forward.
ICON Is Selling the Machine That Prints the Walls
After years spent proving that a robot can print a neighborhood, ICON is putting its construction system in other builders' hands. The harder test starts now: turning spectacular machinery into ordinary infrastructure.
Elicia Azali Is Bringing Heart Into the Floor Plan
After building brands in consumer goods and insurance, Elicia Azali took on an unusually emotional product: the American home. Her playbook starts with listening, turns marketing into company-wide work, and keeps both the spreadsheet and the heart in the room.
LGI Homes
LGI Homes turned the intimidating business of buying a first house into a repeatable system. Its wager is that fewer choices, finished homes and a guided sales process can put ownership within reach - while keeping a national builder disciplined on cost.
Manish Shrivastava
At PulteGroup, Manish Shrivastava turned a career built on brands and shopper behavior toward a purchase where price, place, design and identity arrive in the same decision. His work shows what marketing becomes when the product must be bought, built and then inhabited.
PulteGroup
PulteGroup turned one teenager-built bungalow into a national portfolio of home brands. Its real product is not a floor plan, but a system for matching land, lifestyle and financing to buyers at nearly every stage of adult life.
TraceAir Technologies
TraceAir Technologies is a Seattle-based construction-technology company that turns drone and LiDAR data into a site-intelligence platform for land developers and homebuilders. Founded in 2015, its software captures ground surveys, runs cut-and-fill and earthwork analysis, generates stormwater and grading reports, and gives executives portfolio-wide visibility from land acquisition through vertical construction. The platform is used by many of the largest U.S. homebuilders, including D.R. Horton, Lennar, Howard Hughes and Meritage Homes, and raised a $25M Series B in 2024.
Ivan Lvov
Ivan Lvov is the CEO of TraceAir Technologies, a Seattle-founded construction site intelligence platform that uses drone data and AI to help homebuilders and land developers measure, verify, and manage grading and earthwork from land acquisition through finished lots. He joined TraceAir in 2016 as Chief Strategy Officer and stepped into the CEO role in September 2025, succeeding co-founder Maria Khokhlova. Before TraceAir he spent years scaling a digital mapping and navigation franchise (2GIS) to 16 offices and 450 employees, and he holds an MSx degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Shibusa Systems
Shibusa Systems is a Monterey, California construction-technology company reengineering how single-family homes and ADUs get built. Instead of shipping boxes from a factory, Shibusa pre-engineers every home in a digital Configurator and turns the messy jobsite into a predictable, kit-of-parts assembly it calls Precision Component On-site Assembly. The company claims it cuts build time by roughly 50%, costs by about 30%, and construction waste to under 5%, while delivering homes to Fortified Home resilience standards with low-carbon materials and no natural gas. Founded in New Orleans in 2019 and now based in Monterey, it is backed by seed funding and led by Wall Street veteran Katy Reynolds.
Katy Reynolds
Katy Reynolds is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shibusa Systems, a Monterey, California startup turning home construction into precision on-site assembly. A former Merrill Lynch investment banker turned climate-forward homebuilder, she is rebuilding the way American houses get made - faster, cheaper, all-electric, and out of low-carbon materials.
Homebound
Homebound is a tech-enabled homebuilder headquartered in San Francisco that manages the entire home construction process from design to move-in. Founded in 2018 in the wake of the devastating California wildfires, the company combines a proprietary software platform with a vetted trade partner network to offer semi-custom homes at fixed prices. Homebound handles everything from lot sourcing and permitting to interior design and construction management, compressing what typically takes years into an industry-leading timeline. With over $308 million raised and 500+ homes built across markets in California, Texas, Colorado, and Florida, Homebound is rewriting the rules of residential construction for a new generation of homebuyers.
Nikki Pechet
Nikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilder she launched in 2018 after wildfires devastated thousands of homes in Northern California. A veteran of Bain & Company and Thumbtack, she has built Homebound into a platform that digitizes every step of construction — from custom home design to permitting to build tracking — and has raised over $400 million in equity and real estate capital. She closed her Series A days after giving birth to her third child and has expanded Homebound across California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, with aspirations to become the Amazon of homes.