Meet the 2026 Housing Venture Lab cohort
After reviewing nearly 200 applications from across the United States, we’ve selected the final Housing Venture Lab cohort.
This year, we doubled the size of our cohort, selecting 12 companies across two areas we believe are key drivers of change in today’s housing landscape.
As momentum builds around state and local housing policy intended to boost supply and lower costs, this year’s Housing Venture Lab cohort combines creative ideas with on-the-ground experience and deep subject matter expertise. Ventures in the Opportunity and Access track are tackling historical inequities and administrative burdens with creative, technology-driven solutions, focusing on people hit hard by the housing crisis. In the Building Innovation track, they’re delivering housing faster and more affordably, driven by sustainability, workforce development, and partnership with local communities.
Over the next year, each company will receive a $75,000 seed grant, six months of expert coaching, and access to the Terner Labs network as they work to scale their innovations.
Meet this year’s cohort:
Opportunity and Access: expanding access and economic mobility for people across income levels
The Flagstone Initiative | Poughkeepsie, New York | Founded 2022
The Flagstone Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides cost-burdened low-income renters with $500 no-fee, no-interest rent loans. Flagstone works in partnership with workforce and LIHTC housing providers to deliver help upstream, preventing small problems like car repairs or illness from turning into big problems like eviction and homelessness.
Keyway Homes | Los Angeles, California | Founded 2025
Keyway Homes is voucher-native housing infrastructure that connects tenants, landlords, and public housing agencies on a single tracked workflow, turning a housing voucher into a signed lease faster and with far less friction.
Matrix Rental Solutions | Stamford, Connecticut | Founded 2021
Matrix Rental Solutions provides technology infrastructure to modernize how affordable housing programs operate. Its platform streamlines applications, screening, verification, and compliance, helping housing agencies, nonprofit organizations, and property owners reduce administrative burden and connect qualified households to housing more quickly.
Nestment | San Francisco, California | Founded 2023
Nestment is a homebuying platform built for buyers and distributed through employers. Through 1:1 coaching, proprietary AI tools, clear education, and a vetted network of agents and lenders, Nestment replaces confusion with clarity and aims to give buyers everything they need to make homeownership happen in one place.
Series Homes | Denver, Colorado | Founded 2025
Series Homes aims to make small multifamily and ADU-enabled homes buyable for owner-occupants. Federal lending policy allows buyers to use projected rent to qualify for mortgages on duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and homes with ADUs, but a lack of infrastructure for these purchases makes this virtually inaccessible. Series Homes’ platform integrates property search, rent-backed mortgage underwriting, and property management to create a naturally affordable “missing middle” homeownership category.
Viva Benefits | Austin, Texas | Founded 2021
Viva Benefits provides renters access to wrap-around benefits like 24/7 telehealth, 4% high-yield savings, credit building and home-buying tools to target social determinants of health. These benefits help apartment property owners achieve a 9%+ net income boost from improved renter stability, satisfaction, and retention.
Building Innovation: improving how housing is designed, built, or delivered
Craft Contracting | Tacoma, Washington | Founded 2022
Craft Contracting & Consulting is a woman-owned company advancing the future of housing through innovative offsite construction systems and workforce development. By combining prefabrication, modular construction, turnkey delivery, and strategic partnerships, Craft delivers high-quality homes faster while helping expand access to affordable housing and skilled careers.
Highland Park Technologies | Somerville, Massachusetts | Founded 2022
Highland Park Technologies designs and manufactures prefabricated rapid-install insulated cladding systems to upgrade multi-family homes. Their GRID product snaps onto the outside of an existing home to add insulation and a new exterior finish at the same time, cutting down on installation time, lowering energy bills, and keeping homes in use longer.
Mosaic Timber | Crescent Mills, California | Founded 2023
Mosaic Timber is a cross-laminated timber (CLT) manufacturing company which centers on forest management, converting local forest byproducts (produced from thinning wildfire-prone forests) into high-performance mass timber panels. The company turns fuel-reduction efforts into a supply chain for component-based, carbon-smart housing.
Plumis | London, United Kingdom | Founded 2008
Plumis is a fire safety technology company that designs and manufactures Automist, a water mist-based residential fire suppression system that uses intelligent sensors to locate a fire and direct targeted water mist at its source, suppressing it with up to 90% less water.
Shortstack Housing | Portland, Oregon | Founded 2022
Shortstack Housing is a replicable development platform and housing product, utilizing mass timber modular construction to increase efficiency at the "missing middle" scale. Its founders aim to demonstrate that a standardized, well-designed product can scale impact and put attainable homes within reach.
US Offsite | Redding, California | Founded 2020
US Offsite is a fully integrated design-build factory that offers developers a turnkey experience, handling everything from design and permitting through manufacturing, transport, and on-site installation. The company has delivered more than 200 fully modules while maintaining a commitment to workforce development and creating accessible pathways into the trades, especially for people in rural areas.
