Sustainable, architectural CLT housing startup Asumma announces nearly €1M total funding
Finnish construction technology venture Asumma seeks to build high-quality, sustainable homes across Europe at significant scale — with fresh funding to fuel their tech-enabled house-building platform and early go-to-market activity.
Asumma, the Finnish construction technology startup designing and delivering custom CLT (cross-laminated timber) homes, announces total funding of €945,000, including its recent €720,000 pre-seed financing. Helsinki-based Kiilto Ventures, a corporate VC that invests in startups transforming the built environment, led the round, which also includes a significant technology grant from the European Union via Finland’s ELY Center of Northern Ostrobothnia.
The proceeds are being used to power Asumma’s growth in the Finnish single-family home market, semi-automate its CLT house architecture and engineering, and further develop the tech behind its platform approach to home construction. The company aims to build high-quality, custom homes at significant scale across Europe — for a reasonable, mass-market price point.
‘Our mission is to make high-quality, sustainable housing affordable for everyone,’ says Asumma CEO Martti Mela. ‘Healthy, stable societies require a strong middle-class comprised of homeowners. And our collective future hinges on pushing the construction industry toward more sustainable practices. Our goal is to produce the most architecturally-stunning CLT house product available in Europe — while serving as a global beacon for Finnish environmental values.’
Asumma homes are designed with FSC-certified CLT: prefabricated massive-wood boards formed by gluing perpendicular layers of timber. In addition to being a sustainable, natural construction material, CLT enables complete digital control of house design, innovative architecture, precision manufacturing, and speedy 2-3 day CLT house structure and roof assembly.
Asumma combines parametric design and building information modeling (BIM) to generate custom house designs more efficiently than traditional architecture and engineering firms. The company’s platform approach to home construction supports a resilient supply-chain of vetted suppliers and contractors, who ensure the manufacture, assembly, and construction of Asumma homes. This approach increases transparency, oversight, and quality control for Asumma’s customers, including both homebuyers and property developers.
Pekka Airaxin, Asumma’s Chief Architect and previously member of a Finlandia Prize for Architecture-winning design team, says, ‘Our long-term work to parametrize our design process means that we can create ever-more designs that are as efficient as they are flexible to people’s needs. And, in time, this will enable Asumma to make more homes affordable to larger numbers of people — not just producing a volume of housing, but more so creating housing that enables people to live in places that elevate their day-to-day lives.’
‘The team at Asumma is exceptional and ambitious. With increased funding, they will ramp-up go-to-market activity and house product delivery here in Finland,’ says Head of Kiilto Ventures Ville Solja. ‘They will also double-down on their house-construction tech stack — an innovative, asset-light solution for managing high-volume CLT house design and delivery.’
Asumma is headquartered in Raahe, Finland, with a fully-remote global team. The company is currently executing house projects from the Helsinki capital region to the Finnish Lapland. Asumma designs and delivers high-quality homes built from CLT (cross-laminated timber). Co-founded in 2021, Asumma is led by Martti Mela (CEO), a twice-patented inventor at Nokia and serial property technology entrepreneur with extensive international real estate experience; Pekka Airaxin (Chief Architect), a timber design and BIM specialist, as well as a member of the design team that won the 2021 Finlandia Prize for Architecture; and Vitali Balajevs (CPO), an RICS-accredited product leader previously at a property technology startup with over €5M in funding.
In addition to Kiilto Ventures, Asumma has also attracted individual European investors excited about Asumma’s mission, strategy, and European growth prospects — including Daniel Frese (Asumma’s Chairman of the Board), co-founder of global stock photo and video library Pexels; Ingo Joseph and Bruno Joseph, also co-founders of Pexels; Jaakko Jauhiainen (Asumma’s Board Member), VP and CTO of AINS Group, Finland’s leading architecture, engineering, and construction consultancy; as well as Arto Martonen, Oscar Geagea, and Pasi Raitala of private equity firm BOA Group.
Learn more about Asumma here.
