DreamWeaver launches series sale to bring steel manufacturing firm into production.

Blair Gilbert, founder and CEO of DreamWeaver Homes (LinkedIn)

By THE STAR STAFF

DreamWeaver Homes, a cold‑formed steel manufactured housing company founded a decade ago Tuesday as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, has officially launched a $7.5 million Series A round to bring its Puerto Rico manufacturing facility into full production — marking a major milestone in a project that began with a single meeting inside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The raise aims to enable the company to produce hurricane‑ and earthquake‑resilient steel-frame homes at scale, tapping into Puerto Rico’s historic disaster recovery funding and breaking what company leaders describe as a decades‑long cycle of rebuilding vulnerable housing only for it to be destroyed again.

Founder and CEO Blair Gilbert said in a LinkedIn post that he incorporated DreamWeaver Homes PBC on March 24, 2016. At the time, he was working with Native American tribal nations to develop durable, cold‑formed steel manufactured housing capacity — a model he believed could scale to other communities devastated by natural disasters.

What came next shifted the company’s trajectory. During a HUD meeting about that tribal housing work, Dana Bres, then HUD’s research engineer overseeing building technology and serving as the agency’s representative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, asked Gilbert a question that would shape the next decade of his life: Would he be willing to explore manufacturing steel-frame housing in Puerto Rico?

HUD and FEMA, he noted, had spent years allocating billions to rebuild homes destroyed by repeated hurricanes and earthquakes — only for new storms to wipe out the same communities again.

“We’re sick and tired of throwing good money after bad,” Bres told Gilbert, fresh from witnessing the destruction in Puerto Rico firsthand.

Gilbert agreed to go. Bres made the introductions. And the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO) invited DreamWeaver to build the manufacturing capacity the island lacked.

Gilbert, a Society of Industrial and Office Realtors member, said the team that formed around the Puerto Rico mission is unlike anything he has seen in 40 years in industrial real estate. Tim Waite, a past president of the Steel Framing Alliance, joined as chief operating officer and co‑founder; Javier Vazquez, a former executive director of PRIDCO and architect of Puerto Rico’s housing and manufacturing platforms, became DreamWeaver’s Puerto Rico counsel; and Bres, upon retiring from HUD, joined officially as a technical adviser and equity holder, investing his own capital in the company he first encouraged Gilbert to take to Puerto Rico.

“All of them came to the table through direct experience with the exact problem we exist to solve,” Gilbert said. “None of them are resume fillers.”

DreamWeaver currently holds two confirmed active PRIDCO grants totaling $4.66 million. That support aligns with the broader federal context: HUD has allocated $20.2 billion to Puerto Rico for disaster recovery, $15.3 billion of which remained unspent as of November 2025. DreamWeaver’s factory is designed to produce precisely the type of resilient housing that funding is meant to finance.

From preparation to production

The Series A raise is intended to move the project from its development stage into an operational factory capable of producing high-volume, disaster-resilient steel frame housing for Puerto Rico and beyond.

“Ten years of foundation,” Gilbert said. “The build starts now.”

He added that anyone interested in participating in the raise or the broader conversation around factory-scale resilient housing is encouraged to reach out directly.