What we’re building at Sealed The home of comfort, and so much more

Today I’m happy to announce that Sealed has raised $16 million in a new round of funding led by Fifth Wall, with participation from Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition Ventures, as well as returning backers Cyrus Capital and CityRock Ventures.

Raising money is an important milestone for a company. I’m so proud of our team for getting us to this point, and grateful to our investors for believing in Sealed. But this is not the finish line. It’s the beginning. It’s a challenge to follow through on our mission:

Modernize every home to be comfortable, healthy, and cleaner for the planet.

There’s an urgent need to change the way we heat and cool our homes. Home heating and cooling accounts for 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US. That’s equal to Germany’s total emissions in a given year.

We’ve built a company that can decarbonize America’s homes today.

The good news is the problem is solvable. We don’t need to build all-new houses. We don’t need to sacrifice our quality of life. Home retrofits using existing technologies like insulation and heat pumps can greatly reduce a home’s energy use and carbon emissions while improving everyday comfort and health.

However, at the current rate of adoption, it will take over 500 years to retrofit every American home with the necessary upgrades. We need to act faster. And that’s why Sealed exists. We’re building a company that can decarbonize America’s homes today.

Sealed makes it easy and affordable for homeowners to get the upgrades their houses need. What’s more, we’ve pioneered a business model that’s directly tied to our environmental impact: the more energy our customers save, the more successful we’ll be.

The money we’ve raised will help us expand this work. If we succeed in our mission, we’ll make a huge positive impact on our customers’ everyday lives, all while building a thriving business, creating great local jobs, and helping the planet.

Our vision: Use less to live better

It’s hard getting people to upgrade their heating and cooling just because it’s “the right thing to do.” Fortunately, there’s another incentive: quality of life.

Growing up, we all saw images of “the home of the future,” complete with flying cars and robot butlers. Fast forward a few decades and the home of the future is, in many ways, here. Every song, film, and TV show ever made streams wirelessly into our houses. We have refrigerators that can tell us when we’re out of milk, personal AI assistants that respond to our voice, and electric cars that drive themselves.

And yet, when it comes to heating and cooling, we’re still stuck in the past. Sixty-five percent of the nation’s housing stock was built before 1990, when comprehensive home energy standards were first enacted. Year after year, we rely on outdated, fossil-fuel powered systems, which operate inefficiently and dirty the air. Our houses are too hot in summer and too cold in winter. They’re drafty. They’re stuffy. Much of the time, they’re just plain unpleasant.

When it comes to heating and cooling, most homes are stuck in the past.

We can live better. At Sealed, we’re focused on improving home wellness across three dimensions:

• Comfort: Your house should feel great every day, no matter the weather. You should be able to walk barefoot on your bathroom tiles even if there’s a blizzard outside, and get a good night’s sleep on the hottest summer night.
• Health: Your house should be the place where you physically feel your best. The air you breathe should be fresh and clean. No mold, no mildew, no fossil fuel particulates.
• Environment: Weatherization, combined with the latest heating and cooling tech, can make homes 50% more efficient (sometimes more). That means everyone can have a house that’s cleaner for the planet, and just plain better to live in.

Delivering home wellness

Practically speaking, Sealed can improve a home’s heating and cooling using a few strategic interventions:

• The latest HVAC tech: Heat pumps heat and cool homes up to 3X more efficiently. They also filter the air and can run on clean electricity, not fossil fuels.
• Weatherization: Air sealing and insulation help control airflow and regulate temperature, eliminating heat loss during winter and cool air escape in summer.
• Smart home tech: Smart thermostats help your heating and cooling system run far more efficiently.

We did not invent any of these solutions. In fact, much of this hardware has existed in one form or another for decades. However, most homeowners are either unaware of this work, or they’ve chosen to put it off indefinitely. That’s why we knew we needed to try something different with Sealed.

Building a business that truly stands by its results

We’ve innovated by using fintech and machine learning to make the work easier, more affordable, and more accountable. With Sealed technology, we’ve created a service that breaks down the barriers to modernizing home heating and cooling while, at the same time, aligning our interests with homeowners.

• Ease: We design a custom upgrade plan for every homeowner we work with. Plus, we coordinate all the work and connect homeowners with top-rated local contractors to do the work.
• Affordability: Our financial technology enables customers to pay for the work using their energy savings. Sealed covers the upfront costs of the work, and customers pay us back based on the energy their home saves as a result of the project. Machine learning allows us to predict with a high degree of accuracy the amount of energy customers will save before making the upgrades.
• Accountability: If our customers don’t save energy, we don’t get paid. We see this as a win-win: it means homeowners only pay if the work delivers results, and incentivizes us to select contractors that will deliver the highest quality work, as cost-effectively as possible. It also aligns our business to our environmental impact: Sealed only makes money if we reduce home carbon emissions.

We’ve created a service that breaks down the barriers to modernizing home heating and cooling.

Let’s get to work

We’re a for-profit business working to help homeowners and clean up the planet. This mix of high ideals and strong business sense is what attracts most people who work at Sealed.

But Sealed can’t do it alone. In order to deliver outstanding results, we need outstanding partners. As Sealed expands, we’ll be able to partner with more local contractors in more areas, creating rewarding jobs wherever we go: just eight Sealed projects employ a full team of contractors for a month.

We also partner extensively with energy utilities, including every major energy utility in the state of New York. Reducing home energy use may sound like a counterintuitive goal for utilities, but many energy providers must now meet government mandates for reducing residential energy use. By partnering with Sealed, we can help utilities around the country meet these important goals.

The money we’ve raised has only one purpose: to help us take our work even further. Now it’s time to make it happen.

Let’s create a world where everyone can use less to live better. Learn more about upgrading your home with Sealed.

PS: We’re hiring. There’s never been a more exciting time to work with Sealed. Join us.