Startup of the Month: Zero Homes drives 750% revenue growth with heat pump tech in Colorado

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ColoradoBiz titled Startup of the Month: Zero Homes.

Company: Zero Homes, www.zerohomes.com, Denver

Founded: 2021

Zero Homes founder and CEO Grant Gunnison ran his family’s general contracting business, the Republic Companies, in Anaheim, California, after his father passed away in 2016.

“I had known, conceptually, how difficult it was to run these businesses, but I didn’t realize how unprofitable they were relative to a lot of other businesses and industries, and how challenging they were to run.”

The Republic Companies ultimately shut down, and Gunnison returned to graduate school. He worked as an engineer for NASA, then saw an opportunity to come full circle with a startup that helps contractors avoid the growing pains he’d seen firsthand.

The initial focus is on electric heat pump installations. “There’s a new class of technology that’s actually a lot better than the incumbent,” says Gunnison. “The climate impact is critical. This is a need-to-have system, as opposed to a want-to-have system.”

“There’s a big tailwind around figuring out how to decarbonize what is about a fifth of all emissions, which comes from single-family homes,” he adds. “That’s a hard, highly distributed problem.”

In a Nutshell

Gunnison’s work developing systems for spacecraft catalyzed the realization that digital modeling software was a great match for construction, especially if it could be installed on a smartphone for a homeowner to scan their own place.

“You could build a software layer that could be accessible for everyone in the country,” says Gunnison. “If you could do that, you could actually reduce one of the highest costs in this business, which is acquisition. About 25% of what homeowners pay for upgrades today goes to sales and marketing. If they knew that, they’d probably lose their minds.”

Zero Homes’ app creates a model of a customer’s home that can be used for “a modern purchasing experience” that’s akin to other industries, he adds. It’s also a big timesaver for contractors.

“We can help you just focus on revenue-generating work, actually doing installations, not sales and marketing,” says Gunnison. “It’s not really that novel of an idea. Lots of other industries have digitized sales and productized delivery of solutions.”

Such technology is needed to catalyze the rollout of heat pumps. “We have something like 50 million individual homeowners that have to go through this process in order to solve that problem,” Gunnison notes. “Every house is its own snowflake, so we say bespoke at scale. And you have to build a process to handle that.”

Once a digital model is created, the homeowner discusses options with a Zero Homes advisor to develop a system design. With a price quote in hand, the company then connects the homeowner with installers via a marketplace business model.

“Our technology and business architecture fundamentally reduce costs, so our offering is not cost-plus to homeowners,” says Gunnison. “Our value proposition to homeowners is access, quality, and speed at a middle-market price.”

It’s a win/win. “The name of the game in contracting is utilization,” says Gunnison. “We fill their calendars with good-margin work.”

In 2025, Zero Homes’ revenue jumped by 750%, and Gunnison is aiming for 200% growth in 2026. Now with about 30 employees, Zero Homes could hit 50 by year’s end, he notes.

The Market

Zero Homes is currently working in Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and Massachusetts. “We’re very focused on primary equipment upgrades today, and we will be for the next 18 months,” says Gunnison. “We want to get to a $50 million revenue run rate before we start to expand horizontally.”

Gunnison expects Zero Homes to expand beyond heat pumps as soon as 2027, and possibly partner with contractors for roofing, siding, doors and windows. Maintenance and service are another natural fit, along with home mortgages, insurance, and other financial products. “We have an incredibly high-fidelity view of homes,” he says. “We create a full 3D model of homes using the scan that we’ve created . . . and that means we can do a lot of things.

Financing

After raising a seed round in late 2022, Zero Homes announced a $16.8 million Series A round in early 2026.

Focused exclusively on climate tech, San Francisco-based Prelude Ventures led the Series A. Managing Director Matt Eggers says he’s “a big fan” of Gunnison. “He’s got this amazing background for it, and he’s just hungry and intense and a good dude.”

Eggers says Zero Homes offers HVAC contractors an entry point into heat pumps. “There’s a lot of confusion and difficulty about how to do heat pump installations, because it is really quite different than a furnace installation,” he says. Zero Homes’ app “makes the process simpler and easier for everybody.”