Nick Donahue’s parents were in the business of building houses, which means he spent his childhood hearing about the U.S. construction industry. His dad built homes for major developers, and his mom sold to big-box builders across the East Coast.
Donahue was particularly interested in why designing a custom home cost a fortune and took forever, and why most people had to settle for whatever the developers were offering that year. So when he dropped out of NC State and moved to the Bay Area, he eventually did what you might expect a college drop-out to do in San Francisco: he started a company to fix it.
That effort, Atmos, went through Y Combinator, raised $20 million from investors like Khosla Ventures and Sam Altman, and tried to use tech to streamline the custom home design process. It had designers on staff who worked with clients while software handled the back-end. It grew to 40 people and $7 million in revenue, and they designed $200 million worth of houses, and built 50.
All that sounds great until you hear Donahue describe it. “It became this extremely operational business,” he told me on a Zoom call last week. “Kind of like a glamorized architecture firm.”
It never quite replaced the humans, in other words. Then the Federal Reserve started jacking up interest rates, and suddenly clients who’d spent months designing their dream homes couldn’t afford them anymore. Nine months ago, Donahue shut it down.
Here’s where most founders would take a break, maybe write a few LinkedIn posts about what they learned. Instead, Donahue regrouped and started another company.
Drafted is now nearly five months old, and it’s everything Atmos wasn’t. No designers on staff. No operational complexity. Just AI-driven software that generates residential floor plans and exterior designs in …