When 40,000 individuals plunked down cash to buy a piece of Boxable, a startup company, it indicates there’s something widely appealing about the basic value proposition of the business. In the case of Boxabl, a Las Vegas-based builder of manufactured homes that literally fold up for efficient shipping, the winning combination of innovative architectural design and a solid business plan likely explain its fundraising success.
Through one of the most productive and viral crowdsource funding strategies ever, Boxabl persuaded tens of thousands of small investors to throw down a combined $4 million in the offering’s first 13 days on StartEngine (a record start) and eventually a total of $140m invested in the company to date. Boxabl also utilized a social media campaign to drive traffic to Wefunder and Republic, as well as directly to its own website, where it pitched its unique investment opportunity straight to the masses.
“Thousands of investors have joined this journey and a lot of them double as customers. Crowdfunding really pays off big time,” says Galiano Tiramani, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Boxabl with his industrial designer father. The younger Tiramani previously built and sold businesses in the burgeoning cryptocurrency and marijuana industries, while his father boasts an impressive track record as an entrepreneur and inventor with dozens of patents to his name.
Big Fish Like It, Too
But small investors aren’t the only ones who have enabled Boxabl to build its first factory and deliver over 400 foldable homes from its plant to date, with a second, 125,000-square-foot factory recently completed. Zain Jaffer, the founder of the mobile advertising tech company Vungle, which was acquired by Blackstone for $750 million in 2019, has also backed Boxabl through his Zain Ventures fund. D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in America, has made a strategic investment in Boxabl and ordered 100 of its homes.
Boxabl’s foldable homes solve the single biggest limitation that has plagued the manufactured housing industry until now – the problem of getting pre-built houses from the factory to the homesite. The company’s building system is revolutionizing the construction industry with innovative modular designs and energy-efficient materials, fundamentally changing the way homes are built. Boxabl has successfully fulfilled an order for 156 of its homes from the US Department of Defense. Another shipment of 176 units was recently delivered to serve as employee housing for a mining company with operations in Bagdad, Arizona.
Judging from the progress Boxabl is making at its production facilities, the future looks bright. Early last year the plant began producing about one completed housing unit in a single day, and the rate has since accelerated to one every four hours. With its backlog of customers, it seems for the time being Boxabl can sell its units as fast as the company can make them. Using advanced technology and automated processes, managers at Boxabl think they can speed up production to one completed unit per hour by the end of this year. Eventually, according to Paolo Tiramani, a third factory that the company plans to build within the next few years at a cost of $1 billion will produce a unit every 5 minutes, or less.
What’s Next for Boxabl?
At the International Builders Conference in January, Boxabl, unveiled a two-story version of its chic and affordable, factory-built product. Boxabl’s two-story home contains two bedrooms, a master suite, two and a half baths, an elegant spiral staircase, and an outdoor patio on the second floor. The company’s more basic Casita model measures 20-foot by 20-foot with a layout similar to a studio apartment, including a bathroom, kitchen, living room and bed. The entire home ships as an eight-foot-wide container. It’s energy efficient, structurally sound and resistant to hurricane-force winds.
“The reception for our IBS 2023 display was exciting,” Galiano Tiramani said. “It was a great opportunity to showcase our building system and demonstrate its endless possibilities. We’re grateful for the attention and recognition we received and look forward to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for the future of home building.”
Looking ahead, the Boxabl founders expect at some point to begin franchising their business and to recruit traditional builders to adopt the company’s technologically advanced systems. Also on the whiteboard of potential innovations? Next-day delivery of homes through Amazon, of course!