Zero Homes

Overview

Zero Homes is a Denver-based startup building a digital-first platform for residential heat pump and home electrification upgrades. Founded in 2022 by Grant Gunnison, an MIT-trained engineer with early-career experience at NASA and a background running a general contracting business, the company is trying to solve one of the central friction points in home decarbonization: the installation experience is too slow, too opaque, and too dependent on in-person sales visits that homeowners don't want and contractors can't scale.

Zero Homes' core product is a software platform that allows homeowners to design a heat pump or HVAC system remotely, using a mobile app to scan their home and generate a digital twin, receive a transparent, customized quote with available rebates and incentives already applied, and have the installation managed through Zero Homes' network of vetted local contractors. The company does not employ its own installers; instead it builds a marketplace layer between homeowners and the skilled trades, handling the complexity of system design, load calculations, permit management, and incentive stacking that typically causes home electrification projects to stall or never start.

In February 2026, Zero Homes announced a $16.8 million Series A round led by Prelude Ventures, with participation from SJF Ventures, Exelon Foundation, VoLo Earth Ventures, Overture VC, and FJ Labs. The capital is being used to expand into new markets beyond the company's Colorado base (it is now operating in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Illinois, and California) and to broaden its product suite beyond heat pumps to categories including insulation, EV chargers, water heaters, and electrical panels. The company reports that revenue grew roughly tenfold from 2024 to 2025; it employs about 25 people, with plans to roughly double headcount in 2026, and works through a network of nearly 100 contractor businesses. Two other 2026 milestones added momentum: a roughly $745,000 Advanced Industries grant from Colorado's OEDIT in January, and selection in April by Xcel Energy to lead a roughly $10 million Neighborhood Residential Retrofit Program bringing whole-home electrification to about 2,200 homes in Denver and Aurora. Zero Homes has been covered by Canary Media and other climate-tech and trade press as an emerging player in home electrification services.

The problem Zero Homes is solving

Residential heat pump adoption in the United States has lagged its potential despite strong economics, years of federal support (the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit offered up to $2,000 for a heat pump, though that federal tax credit expired at the end of 2025), and growing consumer awareness of electrification benefits. Installation friction is the bottleneck. Surveys consistently show homeowners are open to heat pumps when they understand them. Getting a heat pump installed typically requires finding a qualified contractor, scheduling an in-home sales visit, waiting weeks for a quote, navigating a confusing landscape of utility rebates and federal tax credits, pulling permits, and coordinating utility interconnection. For most homeowners, this process is opaque enough that the project never gets off the ground.

The contractor shortage compounds the problem. HVAC contractors qualified to install and commission heat pumps are in short supply nationally, and demand from utilities, states, and federal programs has only intensified competition for their time. The best contractors have full order books and little incentive to prioritize individual homeowner jobs that require long sales cycles and manual quoting. A platform that handles the sales, design, and administrative overhead, delivering a ready-to-execute job to a contractor's schedule, reduces their customer acquisition cost and allows them to take on more work with less friction.

The incentive landscape adds another layer of complexity. Between the IRA-funded rebate programs that states are now administering (which can reach several thousand dollars for income-qualified households), state and utility incentives, and local programs, a homeowner installing a heat pump in some markets can still offset a large share of the upfront cost. But identifying and stacking all available incentives requires research that most homeowners won't do and that varies widely by zip code, utility, and household income, all the more so now that the simple federal tax credit has lapsed and the remaining programs are more fragmented. Zero Homes automates this: customers see a price net of all applicable incentives before they commit to anything.

Technology & platform

Zero Homes' technology stack centers on three capabilities. The first is digital home twin creation: homeowners use the Zero Homes mobile app to photograph and scan their home, providing the data inputs needed for accurate system design without an in-person visit. The platform processes these inputs (square footage, existing equipment, ductwork configuration, insulation, window count) into a structured model of the home's heating and cooling load characteristics.

The second capability is automated system design. Zero Homes applies ACCA Manual J load calculation methodology (the HVAC industry standard for residential heating and cooling load calculations) and DOE-validated sizing guidelines to the digital home twin to produce a properly sized heat pump recommendation. This is more technically rigorous than the rules of thumb many HVAC contractors use (oversized systems are common in the industry and reduce efficiency and comfort) and provides homeowners with documented justification for the system they're being sold.

The third is incentive identification and quote transparency. Zero Homes' software queries available federal, state, utility, and local rebate programs by the customer's address, applies eligibility rules, and presents a net-after-incentive price in the customer-facing quote. This removes one of the most serious pain points in the home electrification sales process: customers can see their actual out-of-pocket cost and projected energy bill savings before making any commitment. The platform also handles permit applications and contractor coordination, allowing a homeowner to go from first contact to completed installation with substantially less personal time and phone calls than the traditional HVAC process.

Business model

Zero Homes operates as a platform between homeowners and a vetted network of installation contractors, rather than employing its own crews. This asset-light model means the company does not carry the labor and fleet costs of a field services company, but it also means that the quality of the installation experience depends on contractor network management. Zero Homes vets contractors for licensing, insurance, heat pump certification, and customer service track record; the platform's review system and contractor scoring provide ongoing quality signal.

Zero Homes has not detailed its exact economics, but as a marketplace it earns on a per-project basis rather than by employing crews, taking a margin on the installed cost. The business model is structurally similar to other home services marketplaces. Zero Homes is positioned as the most convenient and transparent option, and the incentive savings it surfaces for customers often more than offset any price premium. The platform's ability to identify and apply rebates accurately is a genuine value-add that directly reduces customer cost, distinguishing it from traditional contractors who may not be current on all available programs.

Scaling the contractor network is the key operational challenge for this model. In each new market, Zero Homes must recruit, vet, and onboard contractors before it can serve customers at meaningful volume. The company's expansion into Massachusetts, Minnesota, Illinois, and California, markets with distinct utility rebate structures, climate profiles, and contractor networks, tests whether the platform's design tools and incentive database can be adapted to new geographies without proportional increases in headcount.

Strategy & outlook

Zero Homes is competing in a space that has attracted substantial attention and capital: digitally-enabled home electrification services. The IRA once promised a decade-long incentive structure for heat pumps, weatherization, and other home upgrades, but the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the federal tax-credit portion short, ending the Section 25C and 25D residential credits at the close of 2025. The separately funded, state-administered IRA rebate programs (the Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates and the HOMES program) survived and continue to roll out unevenly by state, so the policy backdrop that most participants are counting on is now more fragmented and less generous than when many of them started. Comparables include Elephant Energy (coordinating whole-home electrification projects), Sealed (which in 2024 wound down its consumer pay-from-savings retrofits and pivoted to Sealed Pro, a contractor-facing rebate-software platform), the nonprofit Rewiring America (policy advocacy and consumer education, rather than a direct commercial competitor), and a number of utility-backed programs that offer managed heat pump installations.

Zero Homes' differentiation rests on the software platform, specifically the digital home twin and automated ACCA-compliant system design that allows remote quoting without an in-home visit. If this technical capability is accurate enough that contractors can execute installations from remotely-designed specifications with low rework rates, it provides a genuine operational efficiency advantage that is difficult for traditional contractors to replicate. The Series A investors appear to be betting that the platform approach (rather than building a vertically integrated field services company) is the right model for achieving national scale in a market where local contractor networks vary enormously.

The principal risks are execution-dependent. Residential services businesses are notoriously hard to scale: customer acquisition is local, contractor quality is variable, and a single bad installation experience in a small market can damage reputation disproportionately. The incentive landscape that helps the business case is subject to policy risk that is already materializing: the federal Section 25C heat pump tax credit expired at the end of 2025, raising effective customer prices and shifting the available savings toward the surviving state-administered rebates, and further cuts to those programs would slow adoption. A more fragmented incentive map can paradoxically make Zero Homes' automated incentive-stacking more valuable, but only if enough total savings remain to motivate homeowners to act. And the broader question facing all home electrification startups, whether the market can grow fast enough, soon enough, to sustain venture-scale businesses, remains open. Zero Homes' Series A gives it runway to prove the model across multiple geographies; what it does with that runway will determine whether the platform thesis holds at scale.

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