Beyond The Bottom Line: Budget housing that’s sustainable too

Beyond the Bottom Line is a new series by Tech in Asia featuring startups that are focused on creating positive social and environmental change. Check out the full list of featured companies here.

When it comes to social movements, many companies are all talk and no action. Prasoon Kumar, founder of BillionBricks, was sick of it.

Prasoon Kumar, founder of BillionBricks / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

“I used to work at large corporations as an architect,” he tells Tech in Asia. “We’d talk a lot about impact and benefiting humanity, but we didn’t really do that.” Instead, businesses would serve niche groups of people or do smaller charity projects on the side – nothing of any true scale.

“I found that a bit hypocritical, to speak about impact but not make actual attempts,” he points out. “That’s why I founded BillionBricks – to walk the talk.”

Enough was enough

Originally founded in 2013 as a nonprofit, Singapore-based BillionBricks designs and builds residences for low-income families to help alleviate the global housing crisis while addressing climate change concerns. According to a 2024 report by the World Economic Forum, around 1.6 billion people don’t have adequate housing, with this figure potentially rising to 3 billion by 2030.

BillionBricks is built on three core principles. First, the company recognized that existing solutions didn’t work and that it had to start from scratch.

Second, the firm sought to “never design poorly for the poor.” Many conversations around building houses for low-income people focus solely on function and cost, which often come at the expense of other factors like design and comfort.

A model of the houses designed by the BillionBricks team / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

“How can we be so miserable that we don’t even have extra dollars to spare?” he says. “There’s this flawed notion that low-income people have different needs or aspirations, but they’re just the same as us,” Kumar points out.

Third, BillionBricks’ solutions had to be scalable so that the firm could drive systemic changes.

Saving families one tent at a time

In 2017, BillionBricks launched its first wide-scale solution: WeatherHyde, a tent-like shelter that can house a family of five.

Kumar shares that WeatherHyde was inspired by a 2013 news report: in India, there were some 30 children who had died of hypothermia after being rendered homeless due to local riots.

A more permanent solution

The bottom line still matters