Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said on Monday it had backed Flow, the residential real estate company Neumann is building after a failed attempt to take WeWork public prompted him to step down as chief executive. A person familiar with the matter said Andreessen Horowitz had invested $350 million at a valuation of about $1 billion. In May, it had invested an undisclosed amount in Flowcarbon, another Neumann-backed company that is trying to make carbon credit markets more transparent using blockchain technology. In a blog post, co-founder Marc Andreessen praised Neumann as “a visionary leader who revolutionized the world’s second largest asset class – commercial real estate” and stood to shake up residential, the single largest asset class. “Only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-shifting global company in the process: Adam Neumann,” he said. In a nod to past controversies, Andreessen added: “We like to see repeat founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned. For Adam, the successes and lessons are many.” Neumann, who left WeWork as a billionaire, has revealed few details about Flow’s plans: its website only includes the words “live life in flow” and “coming 2023.” A spokesman for Neumann declined to comment. But in an interview with the Financial Times in March, he said he was taking advantage of housing supply and affordability crises that were forcing more young Americans to rent instead of buy. He saw “tremendous opportunity” to provide a greater sense of community in multifamily housing, he said at the time, and was targeting cities like Austin, Miami and Nashville, which combine growing youth populations with job growth, cultural attractions and good weather. Andreessen, an early backer of Facebook and Airbnb, gave few details on how Flow would work, but said it would involve “rethinking the entire value chain, from how buildings are bought and owned to how way residents interact with their buildings. how value is distributed among stakeholders’. After leaving WeWork, Neumann began buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of affordable rental apartments. “We started by buying this property, but then I started walking around the buildings, I just feel like there was so much more that could be done to improve the lives of these tenants,” he told the FT in March.

Neumann had ventured into housing with the launch of WeLive, but only managed to open two of his shared apartment buildings before leaving WeWork. Last October his family office led to $42 million in fundraising for Alfred, which offers tenants services ranging from collecting their dry cleaning to booking community yoga sessions. Marcela Sapone, chief executive of Alfred, however said Flow would not use the company’s “resident experience” product. “This is Alfred’s model, but he will focus on his buildings,” he said. “His belief is that this will be good for both of us.” Andreessen attracted widespread attention early in the coronavirus pandemic with a cry for Silicon Valley to put more of its money into creating physical assets. His essay attacked a “busy complacency” that he said led to underinvestment in building and construction of all kinds, leading, among other things, to “crazy skyrocketing of housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it almost impossible for normal people to move and take the jobs of the future.’ But earlier this year Andreessen and his wife, philanthropist Laura Arrillaga Andreessen, attacked a proposal to change zoning rules in Atherton, California, the affluent Silicon Valley town where they live, to allow apartment buildings, according to The Atlantic . The zoning proposal was rejected in July.