Remodeling boom helps Hover land $25M in Series B

Here's how smartphones are helping contractors do their job faster

Whether it's the rise of popular shows, such as Fixer Upper, or the decline in single-family homes, causing more people to forego buying a new home, there's a growing demand for renovating homes. Americans are expected to spend $340 billion in remodeling in 2018, up 7.5 percent from last year, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

More than half of those interested in remodeling said they want to tackle the exterior of their house, according to Bankrate.

This is all good news for Hover, a new 3D modeling app for the exterior of your home. For those who love renovating and remodeling, like myself, this is a fun app -- though you really only need to use it once. It's mainly used by contractors whose job is to get measurements of a home, in order to execute on any project. 

Hover reduces the time spent getting the measurements.

"For a contractor to build a data package [similar to the one provided by Hover], this will take them a couple days to pull together," said AJ Altman, Founder and CEO of Hover, explaining that a contractor would only need to take a few photos, which would take 10 minutes, depending on the property. On the back end, Hover generates a data package with a relevant architectural model. This process takes about two to three hours. 

Even if a contractor spent several hours to produce the same package, the value of Hover is that it takes all that assessment work and modeling busywork off the contractor's plate. All a contractor has to do is spend 10 minutes taking photos and let Hover do the back-end reconstruction, leaving contractors more time to bid on projects or finish the ones they're working on.  

Hover raised $25 million to expand its footprint of contractors as well as insurance companies, adding to the $31 million it's raised since 2011. Insurance adjusters are using Hover to process claims.

GV, Home Depot and Standard Industries, the parent company of GAF (one of the largest roofing products companies in the US) invested in the current round. Home Depot and Standard Industries have been strategic partners distributing Hover's service to many of its contractor clients.