Bay Area prefabricated construction startup Veev, which promised to slash the time and costs required to build new homes, has announced to its employees that it plans to shutter operations after acquiring unicorn status just last year.

The company, with offices in Hayward and Israel, said in a statement that the closure comes because the startup, which launched in 2008 and was once valued at more than a billion dollars, failed to close a recent financing round. This week, the company laid off most of its 250 employees, according to LinkedIn posts from employees. Veev had only recently finished construction on its first single-family home, which the company intended to bring to market in 2024.

With Bay Area land and construction costs soaring, the company promised a way to build infill housing faster and cheaper. Rather than building a home entirely on-site, Veev built panels, which included electrical wiring, plumbing and other components, in their Hayward factory. The panels could then be transported to a home site and assembled in about a month, rather than the seven months it typically takes for traditional homebuilders.

The company, founded by Israeli immigrant Amit Haller, began as a traditional development company, building luxury properties around the Bay Area. Veev pivoted to prefab construction in 2018, focusing mostly on attached homes and accessory dwelling units, commonly known as mother-in-law units or granny flats. In recent years, Veev had raised $600 million from investors like homebuilding giant Lennar and San Francisco-based venture capital firm Bond.

They benefited from a new state law passed in 2021, SB 9, which allowed owners of single-family homes to subdivide their lots or build two units where once only one was allowed. Modular construction was seen as a way to remove the headache for homeowners who wanted to take advantage of the new law.

But warning signs that the company was in distress began to appear in the last few years.

In March 2022, the company reported a $400 million funding round. The first $200 million was meant to go toward a new factory where Veev would assemble panels for multifamily buildings. But as high interest rates pushed up costs and consumers demanded lower-density housing following the coronavirus pandemic, Veev decided to turn its focus away from multifamily to single-family construction.

In November 2022, Veev pulled out of an agreement with homebuilding giant Lennar (one of the company’s main investors) to build a 102-unit attached home development in Northern California. Around that time, Veev also laid off around 100 employees, a third of its workforce.

The second half of the $400 million round never materialized. Following the company’s pivot, major investors like Lennar backed out, Business Insider reported. The company tried to raise additional funding and when that was unsuccessful, tried to get investors to fund them with a bridge loan — but they could not manage to scrape together additional funds. As of November, the company had stopped paying interest on some of the loans it had taken out to finance property purchases.

Investors Lennar and Bond did not respond to a request for comment.

Veev is not the first modular homebuilder to struggle. In 2021, Menlo Park-based Katerra, which was backed with more than $2.4 billion from Softbank Group’s Vision Fund, filed for bankruptcy.

The post Prefab homebuilder Veev to shutter after funders abandon former ‘unicorn’ | Enterprise appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 14: A factory employee works at the Veev warehouse in Union City, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)

Bay Area prefabricated construction startup Veev, which promised to slash the time and costs required to build new homes, has announced to its employees that it plans to shutter operations after acquiring unicorn status just last year.

The company, with offices in Hayward and Israel, said in a statement that the closure comes because the startup, which launched in 2008 and was once valued at more than a billion dollars, failed to close a recent financing round. This week, the company laid off most of its 250 employees, according to LinkedIn posts from employees. Veev had only recently finished construction on its first single-family home, which the company intended to bring to market in 2024.

With Bay Area land and construction costs soaring, the company promised a way to build infill housing faster and cheaper. Rather than building a home entirely on-site, Veev built panels, which included electrical wiring, plumbing and other components, in their Hayward factory. The panels could then be transported to a home site and assembled in about a month, rather than the seven months it typically takes for traditional homebuilders.

Amit Haller, CEO of Veev, stands for a portrait in San Carlos in 2021. 

The company, founded by Israeli immigrant Amit Haller, began as a traditional development company, building luxury properties around the Bay Area. Veev pivoted to prefab construction in 2018, focusing mostly on attached homes and accessory dwelling units, commonly known as mother-in-law units or granny flats. In recent years, Veev had raised $600 million from investors like homebuilding giant Lennar and San Francisco-based venture capital firm Bond.

They benefited from a new state law passed in 2021, SB 9, which allowed owners of single-family homes to subdivide their lots or build two units where once only one was allowed. Modular construction was seen as a way to remove the headache for homeowners who wanted to take advantage of the new law.

But warning signs that the company was in distress began to appear in the last few years.

In March 2022, the company reported a $400 million funding round. The first $200 million was meant to go toward a new factory where Veev would assemble panels for multifamily buildings. But as high interest rates pushed up costs and consumers demanded lower-density housing following the coronavirus pandemic, Veev decided to turn its focus away from multifamily to single-family construction.

In November 2022, Veev pulled out of an agreement with homebuilding giant Lennar (one of the company’s main investors) to build a 102-unit attached home development in Northern California. Around that time, Veev also laid off around 100 employees, a third of its workforce.

The second half of the $400 million round never materialized. Following the company’s pivot, major investors like Lennar backed out, Business Insider reported. The company tried to raise additional funding and when that was unsuccessful, tried to get investors to fund them with a bridge loan — but they could not manage to scrape together additional funds. As of November, the company had stopped paying interest on some of the loans it had taken out to finance property purchases.

Investors Lennar and Bond did not respond to a request for comment.

Veev is not the first modular homebuilder to struggle. In 2021, Menlo Park-based Katerra, which was backed with more than $2.4 billion from Softbank Group’s Vision Fund, filed for bankruptcy.

The post Prefab homebuilder Veev to shutter after funders abandon former ‘unicorn’ appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Fog City News in the Financial District is closing after 22 years in business.

Kevin Y./Yelp

Fog City News, an acclaimed retailer of magazines, chocolates and other merchandise in the Financial District, will close permanently on New Year’s Eve after 22 years in business, its owner announced.

Where most kiosks have a few dozen magazines, Fog City News at 445 Market St. offers its customers more than 1,200 titles. It has issued more than 1,000 greeting cards — at least 100 of which contain a swear word, I’m told. Zero of its products is available online, reminiscent of the good old days when, dare we say it, you had to set foot in a brick-and-mortar store to buy reading material.

“I named my company Fog City News as a tribute to San Francisco,” said founder and owner Adam Smith in a statement sent to SFGATE. “And I felt it my duty to present this city to visitors in the best possible way by offering a welcoming, elegantly old-fashioned atmosphere, attentive service and the very best products I could find.”

Fog City News in the Financial District is closing after 22 years in business.

Catherine W./Yelp

The store has repeatedly won awards for Best Newsstand and Best Chocolate Shop in the more than two decades of its existence. As the latter designation suggests, Fog City News was not only a go-to place for maps and magazines, but also for fine cocoa products. According to the press release, the store evaluated more than 5,000 candy bars at the time.

Smith said he is not closing the store because of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, nor because of health or landlord issues (the reasons so many small businesses have had to close in recent years). He’s just ready for the next rodeo.

“I ended up achieving everything I set out to do with Fog City News (and some things I didn’t know I set out to do!). And now I’m ready for a new chapter,” Smith said. “I feel lucky to be riding into the sunset on my own terms.”

The post After 22 years, San Francisco’s Fog Metropolis Information newsstand to shutter appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

After more than 10 years as a research center in San Francisco, Bayer is leaving the city to concentrate its research activities in Boston.

“In order to optimally use our resources and carefully leverage internal and external innovation potential worldwide, we have decided to consolidate our research innovation activities in the USA in the Boston, MA area, where we are working on the Kendall Square project in. invest Cambridge, “said a Bayer spokesman on Tuesday evening in an email.

“As a result of this decision, we will close our Open Innovation Center-North America West in Mission Bay, San Francisco in accordance with the end of the lease for this facility,” added the spokesman.

The San Francisco Business Times first reported the site’s impending closure on Monday, noting that the company’s lease for the space expires in October.

RELATED: Bayer’s Billionaire Parkinson’s Bet Lands At The Clinic

Germany-based Bayer settled in San Francisco in May 2010 and relocated 65 researchers to a space vacated by Pfizer near the University of San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. In 2012, the company opened its Mission Bay CoLaborator, a 6,000-square-foot incubator in the same building. The incubator has now been expanded to 30,000 square meters.

When Bayer’s lease on the space expires, the companies that have settled in the incubator will be without homes. Bayer is working “with the CoLaborator companies to ensure a smooth transition to future locations of their choice,” said the spokesman.

The company’s own workforce at the site has shrunk to just 20 as a result of the relocation of research projects between different locations, the spokesman said, adding: “The work of this team will be integrated into the work of other Bayer teams around the world.”

In April, Bayer announced the impending closure to its employees and encouraged those affected to apply for other positions within the company, including nearly 100 biotech positions at the Berkeley site across the bay.

RELATED: Bayer Pays $ 2 Billion Upfront for AskBio to Drive Gene Therapy Expansion

The Berkeley site is home to Bayer’s global production center for hemophilia A products, but could contain a lot more at some point. The company is seeking approval from Berkeley executives for a 30-year plan to add 1 million square feet of manufacturing, research, and office space to the site, the San Francisco Business Times reported in April. It is planned to use the site for the production of drugs such as protein therapeutics as well as cell and gene therapies.

The post Bayer to shutter San Francisco analysis hub after 10-year stretch appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.