About
Jason Ballard is a Texas-born conservationist-turned-builder who co-founded ICON in 2017 with the explicit mission of using robotics and advanced materials to solve the global housing shortage. Before ICON he co-founded TreeHouse, a sustainable home-improvement retailer based in Austin that aimed to be a 'Whole Foods of building products' and operated stores across Texas in the 2010s. Ballard studied conservation biology and is a long-time advocate of regenerative building; he has framed ICON's work as an attempt to make the construction industry behave more like a manufacturing industry, with software-defined product lines, repeatable robotic processes, and dramatically lower marginal cost per home. He is the public face of the company across CNBC, 60 Minutes, TED, and SXSW appearances, and he is also the principal investigator on ICON's NASA Project Olympus contract for lunar-surface construction. Under his leadership ICON has printed dozens of permitted homes (House Zero, Community First! Village, Wolf Ranch with Lennar) and raised more than $450M including a $451M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2022.
Previous roles
- Co-founder, TreeHouse (sustainable home-improvement retailer)
- Sustainability and green-building consultant
Notable work
- ICON
- 3D printing
- additive manufacturing
- construction tech
- sustainable building
- robotics
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