Geoship Unveils Bioceramic Geodesic Dome Prototype, Announces ‘Earthshot’ Mission: To Make the Best Home the Most Affordable Home

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Sustainable Housing Vision Powers Community-First Fundraising Campaign

Geoship InteriorMarch 23, 2023 – Nevada City, CA – Geoship, the leader in next-generation affordable homes, announced that it has built an engineering prototype structure on its design and manufacturing testing ground here.

The company is continuing towards its ‘Earthshot’ mission: To make the best home on earth the most affordable one while scaling manufacturing to one million homes per year (faster than Tesla Motors.) The recently revealed world’s first fully bioceramic geodesic home comes as they have launched a community-first funding round on Republic.com. The round is open for a limited time. Since its launch in 2019, Geoship has received over 10,000 dome preorders, including over 500 with paid deposits. The company currently has over 2,000 investors. Prospective partners are invited to learn more at: www.republic.com/geoship.

Geoship’s ‘first principles’ approach to home manufacturing combines the most efficient geometry, materials, and manufacturing methods. The world’s strongest known structure, the geodesic dome, is combined with a breakthrough in chemically bonded ceramic materials developed at US National Labs. The unique, eco-friendly combination uses naturally found materials. It enables homes that cost half as much as traditional structures, have a 90% smaller carbon footprint, and are designed to last up to 500 years.

Using injection molding, a popular manufacturing modality never before used in home building, Ceramic domes can be rapidly manufactured and assembled on-site, maximize material efficiency, and are ultra energy efficient and resistant to earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and fires.

While the domes can be built as individual units or clusters, Geoship sees villages of the future materializing from the digital space. Geoship domes will be conceived in virtual reality by networked communities, then built with a shared vision for common areas, permaculture, and community self-sufficiency. The domes even benefit from known health benefits related to natural light, curved shapes, and healthy natural materials.

Geoship founder and CEO Morgan Bierschenk stated, “Millions of homebuyers want to leave the city and live closer to nature and community – in affordable, sustainable, ultra-modern, natural homes. Ceramic domes and regenerative villages uniquely serve this emerging market. Our Nevada City prototype dome has attracted interest from architects, artists, engineers, developers, and dome lovers from over 60 countries. Thanks to platforms like Republic, the right to invest in world-changing private tech companies is no longer limited to accredited investors. Through our community-first funding campaign, we’re inviting purpose-aligned individuals worldwide to join our Earthshot. Investment in this round is open to everybody; we encourage prospective customers and investors to join our exciting mission and build the regenerative future of home!”

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About Geoship SPC:
Geoship SPC is a leading innovator in next-generation homes, featuring a unique combination of eco-friendly ceramic materials and geodesic dome structures. The firm grew from the vision of its two founders, Morgan Bierschenk and Bas Kools, to address some of the greatest challenges of our time: affordable housing, climate change, chronic disease, and social isolation. Investment information for Geoship’s current funding round can be found at Republic.com/Geoship (see terms and conditions at republic.com) or www.Geoship.is.

Torii, Tinder For Real Estate, Announces Seed Round from Noted VCs

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Boston, MA – May 20, 2021 – Torii, a next-generation real estate brokerage with an app that allows users to search for homes via a Tinder-like interface (swipe right to match with your perfect home), are thrilled to announce a successful seed round of venture funding from a number of noted VCs.

Born out of the frustration of Torii’s CEO James Rogers’ experience with an ineffectual and archaic system, he founded Torii to reimagine the entire way people buy homes from top to bottom, search to close. With Torii, homebuyers have access to helpful tools in the Torii app, work with a dedicated agent and a whole team behind them, get their closing costs refunded (averaging around $7500!), and then get a personalized Move-In Survival Kit (with toiletries and cleaners, plus other fun and must-have items that are probably still packed away) to smooth their move!

The company has just completed a $3.2m Seed Round and are excited to announce some notable investment including $1m from Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey’s SNR.VC, $1m from noted crypto hedge fund founder Dan Matuszewski’s CMS Holdings, $1m from longtime noted investor Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH, and around $200k from smaller accredited investors.

This is in addition to a successful $1.4m Pre-Seed round in 2019 that saw an investment of $1.1m from Calacanis’ LAUNCH Accelerator and $310k from the founders’ actual friends and family.

The site launched in 2018 at first offering sales in their HQ location, Boston, but have since added the Bay Area in California, and they just launched in the Los Angeles area last month.

Even with residential real estate in an extreme seller’s market, Torii’s licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, knowledge of the real estate market, and their ability to advise their clients on making offers that win and close. Torii’s intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer and live chat with their team, all from their phones.

In addition to a wonderful interface and dedicated, talented staff, Torii’s business model pays agents a salary plus commission (instead of the typical real estate commission-only structure) and uses the buyer’s agent commission to pay their buyer’s closing costs, saving clients an average of $7500 per transaction.

Torii CEO James Rogers notes, “we’re looking forward to using this investment to continue to build our incredible team in our current markets while adding new cities throughout 2021. We’ll also continue to develop our machine learning-powered search, that ‘learns’ what each buyer is looking for while they swipe through homes, similar to dating app interfaces – what style of home they like, what home amenities truly matter to them, and more, allowing buyers to find the right home faster, while we continue to decrease friction in real estate transactions while creating a seamless experience for buyers.”

About Torii:
Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service. Our licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge of the real estate market. Our intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer, live chat with our team, and track an offer’s progress, all from their phones. Why buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.

Torii is fully licensed and operates in Massachusetts and California, specializing in homes for sale in Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.

Tinder For Real Estate and So Much More, Torii Launches Sales in Los Angeles

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Torii Lets Users Swipe Home Listings, Handle the Entire Buying Process Through Their App, and Pays Buyers’ Closing Costs

Los Angeles, CA – April XX, 2021 – Home buying for many people can be a painful, stressful, and scary process. Born out of the frustration of Torii’s CEO James Rogers’ experience with an ineffectual and archaic system, he founded Torii to reimagine the entire way people buy homes from top to bottom, search to close.

Now, this tech-powered real estate agency is available to buyers in Los Angeles. Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service, resulting in a very familiar feeling interface, similar to Tinder, but with the addition of data-backed real estate tools to empower Torii’s home-buying clients, and a reliable team of expert agents too.

Even with the real estate market here and nationwide in an extreme seller’s market, Torii’s licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, knowledge of the real estate market, and their ability to advise their clients on making offers that win and close. Torii’s intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer and live chat with their team, all from their phones. Why would today’s phone-based home shoppers buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.

In addition to a wonderful interface and dedicated, talented staff, Torii’s business model pays agents salaries (instead of the typical real estate commission structure) and uses the buyer’s agent commission to pay their buyer’s closing costs, saving clients an average of $7500 per transaction.

Torii launched in 2017 in Boston and the service is currently available there, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now in Los Angeles. Their team here consists of a number of top real estate agents including Annabelle Brownell who is a real estate broker and mortgage loan specialist representing real estate buyers, homeowners, and investors looking to purchase real estate. She is dual-licensed to service real estate purchasing as well as mortgage financing options linked to real estate assets. With an undergraduate degree from UCLA and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Management, Annabelle’s career includes seven years in technology marketing, seven years as a successful entrepreneur, and seven years as a real estate and business broker, including mortgage loan origination.

Annabelle is joined in Los Angeles, by LA native Leon Townsend III, who started his real estate career at Century 21 in 2015. Always a bit of a prodigy, Leon was the youngest high school graduate in the history of Pasadena High School and received both his undergraduate degree and MBA from California Lutheran University. Very oriented towards community building, Leon is an Advisory Board Member of the California Association of Realtors Young Professionals Network, the co-founder of the Deliberately Fair Housing group on Facebook, and is a frequent blood donor at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Torii CEO James Rogers notes, “we are thrilled to enter the LA real estate market and to start growing our team there, beginning with these two amazing agents who are used to prioritizing client service up to our extremely high standards. While it’s a challenging market out there, we know our team will be able to win homes for our clients along with saving them money as we pay our client’s closing costs.”

About Torii:
Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service. Our licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge of the real estate market. Our intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer, live chat with our team, and track an offer’s progress, all from their phones. Why buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.

Torii is fully licensed and operates in Massachusetts and California, specializing in homes for sale in Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.