Meet the 2025 Housing Venture Lab Cohort
Today, Terner Labs announced the sixth cohort of entrepreneurs selected for the Housing Venture Lab, an accelerator providing wraparound support for bold new ideas to make housing more equitable, accessible, and sustainable. This year marks a significant milestone as we launch our pilot Ideas Fellowship within the Housing Venture Lab. The Ideas Fellowship is designed to support founders with bold, important ideas at the very beginning of their journey into housing innovation with additional time and resources to develop their concepts.
The seven selected ventures will receive a $75,000 seed grant, six months of expert coaching and access to the Terner Labs and Center network, including a growing Housing Venture Lab alumni network. Ideas Fellowship recipients will receive targeted support and mentorship for founders at the pre-pilot stage.
The 2025 Housing Venture Lab cohort centers on two critical challenges: expanding access to homeownership and bridging persistent financing and permitting gaps that block equitable housing opportunities. Together, these ventures reimagine how homes are accessed, financed, and developed.
Some focus on creating new pathways to stable housing by reducing traditional barriers, such as lowering upfront costs, streamlining credit-building, or empowering families to build their own homes, while preserving community wealth and resilience. Others address the financing obstacles faced by smaller-scale development and climate-vulnerable households, leveraging innovative tools like smarter lending methods, faster and clearer approval processes, and creative funding options that protect homeowners.
Together, these ideas combine practical improvements to current systems with bold new ways of thinking about housing. They meet urgent needs today while laying the groundwork for a fairer, more affordable housing future.
Read more about this year’s cohort below:
Grounded Solutions Network - Homes for the Future
Washington, D.C. | Founded: 2016
Grounded Solutions Network’s Homes for the Future (HFTF) program helps make homeownership more affordable for families with moderate incomes. The program buys houses in neighborhoods where the cost of living is rapidly increasing, rents them at affordable rates while paying off the purchase costs, and then sells them at discounted prices to families or organizations that agree to keep the homes affordable for future buyers.
HFTF is unique in that it locks in affordability at the property level. Rather than requiring fresh subsidy for each subsequent homebuyer, HFTF properties remain affordable for the long-term, providing generations of families with opportunities to build wealth and avoid displacement.
Moab, Utah | Founded: 2010
Community Rebuilds is a nonprofit organization that builds affordable, environmentally sustainable homes in rural Utah while training the next generation of construction workers. Through a federally supported “mutual self-help” model, low-income families contribute labor to help build their own homes, reducing construction costs and gaining valuable skills.
Community Rebuilds has built nearly 80 homes in five different communities and trained over one thousand students since 2010, using natural and recycled materials and culturally respectful designs to ensure long-term affordability, energy efficiency, and resilience. By combining hands-on education, sustainable building, and housing equity, Community Rebuilds creates both homes and opportunities for historically underserved communities.
San Francisco, California | Founded: 2024
Infilla is a software startup that helps local governments streamline and modernize their permitting and planning processes - making it faster, easier, and more transparent to build housing. Infilla offers modular tools like impact fee calculators, smart intake forms, and searchable zoning guidance. These tools reduce paperwork, cut down on delays, and help city staff process applications more efficiently, all of which lower costs and speed up housing production, especially for smaller developers and affordable housing projects.
By improving government systems that are often outdated and hard to navigate, Infilla helps ensure that more diverse developers can access and complete projects, making housing development more equitable and predictable.
San Francisco, California | Founded: 2024
Jubilee Homes offers a market-based approach to affordable homeownership that works to protect buyers and avoid predatory terms. By separating the purchase of a home from the land it sits on, Jubilee enables buyers to significantly reduce their upfront costs by up to 90%. Buyers own their homes outright while Jubilee leases them the land for up to 99 years. Customers have the option to purchase the land at any time, combining the benefits of traditional homeownership with increased affordability.
The model splits property appreciation proportionally between institutional investors and homeowners, aiming to expand access to ownership in high-cost markets. It helps more people, especially those historically priced out, build long-term wealth and stability while maintaining the homeowner’s flexibility and control.
Baltimore, Maryland | Founded: 2019
Rooted, a new venture from Project Own, is a nonprofit web platform designed to help more low- and middle-income families become mortgage-ready by making financial coaching more efficient and accessible. Built specifically for HUD-certified housing counseling agencies, Rooted equips financial coaches with tools like automated credit analysis, mobile-first client intake, and text-based communication to streamline coaching and reduce administrative work. This allows agencies to serve more clients, often first-time homebuyers and predominantly women and Black households, at a lower cost.
With early traction across multiple states and growing partnerships, Rooted is working toward broader adoption across the nation’s 1,500 housing counseling agencies, making homeownership more achievable for those historically locked out.
The 2025 Ideas Fellows
Washington, D.C. | Founded: 2025
BuildTrust aims to democratize development by unlocking financing to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and other scalable housing solutions. As states around the country remove barriers to ADUs and other missing-middle housing options, access to construction financing remains the key challenge in translating policy changes into new homes.
BuildTrust aims to address this by aggregating nationwide project data, providing AI-driven project-level insights, and developing loan products that support innovation through standardization, making construction financing straightforward for lenders and widely accessible for homeowners. Connecting local housing solutions to national financial infrastructure, BuildTrust is helping communities build wealth while addressing the housing crisis one backyard at a time.
Oakland, California | Founded: 2020
Buy-In Community Planning (Buy-In) is a nonprofit with the goal of helping communities vulnerable to environmental hazards develop and fund voluntary relocation plans. By combining geospatial data with participatory planning, Buy-In designs buyout programs that allow lower-income homeowners at high risk to safely relocate if they choose. Buy-In seeks to prevent climate-driven wealth loss in low-income communities and communities of color. These communities are often most at risk, living in high-exposure areas with limited infrastructure and facing systemic barriers to vital support like affordable insurance, financing, and government aid while simultaneously facing depreciation of their home assets.
Buy-In's innovative “Buy-In Bank” concept aims to provide affordable financing and insurance alternatives so homeowners can retain equity and purchase safer homes, addressing a critical rehousing cost gap that often disproportionately impacts low-income and BIPOC communities. With a focus on equity and environmental restoration, Buy-In supports resilient, fair, and sustainable solutions to climate-driven displacement.
About the Housing Venture Lab
Founded in 2019, the Housing Venture Lab is an accelerator providing wraparound support for entrepreneurs with new, bold ideas to make housing more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.
The Housing Lab has previously worked with 28 nonprofit and for-profit ventures, nearly two-thirds of which have been led by people of color. Alumni have gone on to raise over $490 million and improve the lives of more than 163,000 people. Learn more about our past cohorts here.
The Housing Venture Lab is generously supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, The Hilton Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Ivory Foundation, The Howard and Irene Levine Family Foundation, Payette River Foundation, The Ballmer Group and several other philanthropic organizations and individuals.
About the Ideas Fellowship
The Ideas Fellowship was created to serve entrepreneurs in the idea or early implementation phase of launching bold ideas for housing affordability who otherwise might not have the resources to get their ventures off the ground in moving from concept to completed pilot.
The Ideas Fellowship includes participation in the Housing Venture Lab cohort, plus funding to support founders in working on their ideas full-time for six months, targeted support for founders at the pre-pilot stage, and mentorship from later-stage founders. The Ideas Fellowship is made possible by support from Wells Fargo.
Applications for the next round of the Housing Venture Lab and Ideas Fellowship will open in early 2026. To stay up to date on our work and learn about future application opportunities, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to the Terner Labs newsletter.
