Most people who build software never touch a hammer. Takeshi Homma comes from a family that did little else for four centuries - and that inheritance sits at the center of everything he is now trying to do with the home.
Homma, who goes by Ted in the United States, is the founder and chief executive of HOMMA Group, a company he started in Palo Alto in 2016. On paper it is a smart-home business. In practice it is an argument: that the place where people spend most of their lives has barely changed in a hundred years, and that it is long overdue for a rethink from the studs outward.
He is descended from a Japanese family with fifteen generations in the building trades, historically carpenters who worked on shrines and temples. That is not a decorative footnote. It is the frame through which he reads the whole industry. When he looked at how homes were designed, financed, built and lived in, the thing that struck him was how little the fundamentals had moved while phones, cars and offices raced ahead.
01The long road to the front door
Homma did not arrive at housing directly. He started early - as a student at Chuo University in Tokyo, he founded an internet company called Yellnet during the first web boom and sold it in 2002. That exit gave him a track record and, eventually, a route out of Japan.
In 2008 he joined Sony and relocated to California. Four years later he moved to Rakuten, the Japanese internet giant, as Executive Officer for Global Digital Content. It was a senior seat at one of the country's most ambitious companies. By most measures he had made it.
Then, in 2016, he left to build houses. The trigger, by his own account, was mundane and personal: he looked into buying a home abroad and found the process slow, opaque and expensive - a jarring contrast with the faster construction cadence he knew from Japan. The frustration turned into a question, and the question turned into a company.
02The housing version of Tesla
The phrase Homma reached for to describe HOMMA was deliberate: a "housing version of Tesla." The comparison is not about luxury or hype. It is about integration. Tesla did not add a screen to a normal car; it rethought the car as a piece of software with wheels. Homma wants to do the same to the home - to treat the building, its systems and its intelligence as one designed object rather than a house with gadgets bolted on afterward.
That distinction runs through HOMMA's product. The company designs, develops and builds its homes, then embeds proprietary technology directly into the architecture: adaptive lighting, automated window shades, connected thermostats, keyless entry and door locks, all controlled from a single app. The pitch is that the technology should recede into the background - noticed, if at all, only by its absence.
One more idea sets the approach apart: the notion that a home can improve after you move in. Because so much of the experience lives in software, HOMMA frames its houses as things that receive updates over time - closer to a device than to a fixed asset. It is a quietly radical claim about a category that has always been defined by permanence.
03From proof of concept to communities
HOMMA has moved from renderings to real addresses. The company delivered HOMMA HAUS Mount Tabor, billed as the nation's first pre-configured, multi-family smart-home community, and announced a townhouse project in the Woodstock neighborhood of Portland. It has also worked on a smart-home unit development tied to the Willamette Tower in Portland and transformed a traditional Boston high-rise apartment into a smart-home proof of concept.
The strategy has attracted heavyweight partners. HOMMA drew investment from NTT DOCOMO Ventures and partnered with Diamond Realty Investments, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation, to bring built-in intelligent homes to a larger scale. Early individual backers reportedly included Rakuten co-founder Hiroshi Mikitani and the Hollywood producer Masi Oka - a signal that the idea resonated across both the Japanese business world and Silicon Valley.
Adaptive, automated lighting that adjusts to the rhythm of the day.
Keyless entry and connected locks controlled from the HOMMA app.
Connected thermostats tuned for comfort and energy efficiency.
Automated window shades integrated into the architecture.
A home that receives updates and improves after move-in.
Technology woven into modern design, meant to disappear.
04Two worlds, one blueprint
Homma is, in a sense, a translator. He carries a craftsman's respect for materials and permanence from a lineage of temple builders, and pairs it with the software instincts he sharpened at Sony and Rakuten and in Silicon Valley. HOMMA has operated across Palo Alto, Portland, Tokyo and Seoul, and it recruited early talent from Apple, Tesla, Amazon and Disney - a mix of hardware precision, product design and storytelling.
That cross-cultural footing shows up beyond the company too. Homma was nominated to the Board of Trustees of the Portland Japanese Garden, an institution devoted to the same patient, considered aesthetic his ancestors practiced. It is a fitting association for someone whose whole thesis is that the future of living does not have to feel synthetic or loud.
What Homma is chasing is not a smarter gadget but a different default - a home where intelligence is standard, invisible, and built in from the first drawing. Whether the industry follows is an open question; housing is famously slow to change, which is precisely the point he started with. But the wager is clear, and it is a long one. He has said he wants to spend the rest of his life on it.
It is a strikingly patient ambition for a technology founder, and maybe that is the tell. Fifteen generations of builders did not think in quarters. Homma is betting that the home, of all things, rewards the same long view.