Mighty Buildings, a startup building tech for prefabricated, ostensibly environmentally-friendly homes, today announced that it raised $52 million in a funding round co-led by Waed Ventures and Bold Capital with participation by Khosla Ventures.

The new tranche, which sources familiar with the matter say values the startup at between $300 million and $350 million, brings Mighty Buildings’ total raised to $150 million. CEO Scott Gebicke says that it’ll be put toward Mighty Buildings’ expansion in North America and the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, and supporting the launch of the company’s next-gen modular homebuilding kit.

“The pandemic aggravated the housing shortage in the US and other countries, as projects needed to be paused and construction workers permanently left the industry,” Gebicke told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Recent interest rate increases, which were expected to cool housing demand, have had the opposite effect, as the secondary market for used houses plummeted, driving ever more demand for newly built homes.”Mighty Buildings was founded in 2017 by Slava Solonitsyn, Dmitry Starodubtsev, Dmitry Starodubtsev and Alexey Dubov, who sought to create a platform leveraging 3D printing to help automate the construction industry, specifically the home construction industry. Gebicke, a former naval officer and previously a project lead in McKinsey’s industrial practice, was appointed CEO last December.

3D-printed, prefab homes may sound out of the ordinary. But they’ve become more common as fluctuating construction materials and labor costs push property developers to seek affordable alternatives to traditional home building.

The U.S. is short 650,000 construction workers, according to the trade association Associated Builders and Contractors. And 82.5% of materials — including electrical conduit, steel and concrete — have experienced “significant” cost increases since 2020, per a report in Oxford Economics.3D-printed homes promise to be comparatively cheap — and easy to assemble. A 2018 study in the academic journal IOP Science: Materials Science and Engineerings argues that 3D printing can cut costs by at least 35%. And according to industry experts, it takes as little as a month to piece together an entire 3D-printed home — far shorter a time frame than the six to eight months spent constructing a typical house.

Charitable organizations including Habitat for Humanity have begun to print homes for families, and neighborhoods of 3D-printed homes — albeit quite small ones — have begun to spring up.

“We typically compete against traditional building methodologies, such as stick-built single family homes in the U.S. and concrete precast in the Middle East,” Gebicke said. “In most developed and developing nations in the world, the industry must build more homes much faster in order to address the supply shortages.”

Mighty Buildings provides a prefabricated kit of parts to developers, who use its product to build residential structures. Initially, San Francisco-based Mighty Buildings sold prefab homes directly to customers. But within the past two years, the startup has shifted to selling whole communities of homes to developers.