Hometeam Ventures | Our Story & Team

2014

Alexandria Lafci co-founds New Story

Growing up in Section-8 housing and teaching homeless students during Teach for America, Alexandria became passionate about solving the housing crisis. She starts New Story to build homes for low-income families faster, cheaper, and at scale.

2015

New Story

New Story becomes one of the few non-profits ever accepted into Y Combinator. Since then, the New Story team has raised over $100M and aims house over one million people in the coming decade. The organization has been recognized four times by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.

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2016

Alexandria searches for founders building technology for the construction industry

She does deep research into solutions that can help her build more effectively and narrows in on additive manufacturing. The research leads to a connection and eventual deep partnership with 3D printing company, ICON.

Research would later become a defining part of Hometeam Ventures’ culture and approach. Learn more about our research fellowship here.

2017

Printing the world’s first 3D printed community of homes

New Story and ICON co-develop and build a community of homes in Southeast Mexico. Alexandria invests in ICON, now valued a unicorn. AppleTV+ comes to record a docuseries episode about this project. The project gets over 2 billion press impressions and Alexandria is flooded with inbound messages from founders and innovators building technology for the construction industry. Watch the episode

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2019

Alexandria tries to support these founders with connections and advice, but they also need capital.

She invites these founders to test and experiment in New Story communities. Founders love this because they get an early opportunity to test and iterate in a real-world setting with feedback. Alexandria learns what technology works, what doesn’t, and why. Founders tell her that there are almost no venture capital allocators with experience in construction, especially at the early stage. Alexandria finds it hard to ignore this gap.

2020

Testing Our Assumptions with a Listening Tour

We spoke with over 100 housing and construction stakeholders—from policymakers and construction executives to jobsite workers—to understand the industry’s readiness for innovation. Three takeaways inspired the launch of Hometeam Venture:

1. The construction industry is finally ready for digital transformation, creating a generational investment opportunity.

2. While late-stage investors are paying attention, few early-stage allocators have the expertise to invest confidently at the start in construction.

3. Construction is one of the most powerful levers we have to tackle housing affordability and climate change.

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2021

Hometeam is founded.

This fund is purpose-built to back the founders modernizing how we build and who gets to benefit from it. See our portfolio.

Our team

Alexandria Lafci

Founder & Managing Partner

A lifelong advocate for housing innovation, Alexandria’s work is rooted in personal experience, from growing up in Section 8 housing to teaching unhoused students as a Teach For America educator. She later co-founded New Story, a YCombinator funded nonprofit that raised over $100M and built homes for thousands of people. Her partnership with construction tech startup ICON in 2017 led to the creation of the world’s first 3D-printed housing community and a seed-stage investment in what is now a unicorn company.

Through years of hands-on work with builders and technologists, Alexandria developed a unique lens for identifying commercially viable innovation in the built world, ultimately leading her to launch Hometeam Ventures with an oversubscribed Fund I.

Outside the fund, Alexandria serves on the Technical Review Board at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), where she advises on updating national building codes and accelerating adoption of sustainable construction materials. She is also a Kauffman Fellow, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award winner, and frequent speaker on housing, venture capital, and climate innovation.

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Andra Stanciu

Head of Research

Andra is a trained architect with over a decade of international experience translating ambitious designs into real-world impact. She brings a rare blend of design, infrastructure, and policy experience to supporting founders in the built environment.

Before joining Hometeam Ventures, Andra led her own architectural practice and advised public and private stakeholders across Europe on capital-intensive development projects. She worked with the Paris-Saclay Development Authority to deliver a 45,000 sq ft public facility and oversaw the design of over 100,000 sq ft of housing in Paris. Her strategy work for the Paris Métropole Authority became a model for innovation-led urban planning.

As part of the EU's Expert Network for the Green Deal, she has evaluated over 100 high-impact projects focused on decarbonization, circularity, and climate resilience. She also mentors early-stage entrepreneurs at the intersection of cities, climate, and technology.

Holding advanced degrees in both architecture and economics, Andra bridges creative vision with systems-level thinking—bringing a unique perspective to construction, infrastructure, and climate-tech investing.

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Vienna Poiesz

Operations

Vienna Poiesz brings deep operational expertise to Hometeam Ventures, where she supports all non-investing functions, including investor relations, fundraising, compliance, and fund operations.

Vienna has worked across the full spectrum of venture fund maturity — from lean, emerging funds to established institutional platforms — giving her a uniquely well-rounded understanding of what it takes to both operate efficiently and scale intentionally. At Hometeam, as our fractional COO, she leverages this experience to help the firm stay resource conscious while building for long-term growth.

Previously, she was Director of Operations at Data Community Fund, where she led daily operations and helped launch Fund II as one of only two team members. Prior to that, Vienna was a Senior Associate at Energy Impact Partners. She joined as the 7th employee and helped scale the firm from $50 million to over $2 billion in assets under management. During her time there, EIP launched eight new funds, and Vienna worked across every operational vertical — giving her a strong foundation in what it takes to institutionalize a venture firm.

Vienna holds honors degrees from both UC Berkeley and Oxford University in Politics.

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Hometeam Ventures is where mission, momentum, and experience converge.