America Is 6.5 Million Homes Short. We Went Inside the Factory Trying to Fix It.

We shot this one in two countries. Owen sat down with co-founder Alex Gampel in London. Our co-host Martin flew to Eastern Europe to walk through Cuby’s R&D headquarters and prototype manufacturing center with CEO Oleg. The result was one of the more detailed, on-the-ground looks at a construction startup we’ve published – the kind you don’t get from a press release or a pitch deck.

Seven months later, it keeps finding new audiences. Views are up 25% in the last 28 days compared to earlier in its life. That’s not typical for long-form documentary content. And when we went back to watch it ourselves, it was pretty clear why people keep landing on it. The problem Cuby is attacking – a structural shortage of homes, evaporating skilled labor, and a construction industry that hasn’t fundamentally changed how it builds in decades – has only gotten more acute.

The full documentary is over on our BB Beyond channel. The shorter cut above is a good place to start.

The Problem Still Hasn’t Been Solved

America needs twice as many homes as it’s building

The US is currently building around one million homes a year. Demand requires closer to two million. That gap isn’t a rounding error – it’s the structural reason housing costs have become politically toxic, why multigenerational households are stacking up, and why essential workers are commuting 90 minutes each way from somewhere they can actually afford to live. The income needed to buy an average US home jumped 50% in just four years. Since 1990, affordability has worsened threefold.

The reasons are mostly unsexy. Bureaucratic delays add years to permitting timelines. Material costs are up north of 40% since the pandemic. And the workforce is aging out faster than anyone is replacing it. Seven workers retire for every one that enters the trades. Walk past any active construction site today and you’ll spot what Alex called “a lot of gray beards and gray hair.” By 2031, nearly half the current construction workforce is expected to retire. Those workers aren’t being replaced at anywhere near the same rate.

Why Other Attempts Failed

Katerra raised $2 billion. It still went bust.

Industrializing home construction has been tried before, and those attempts are worth taking seriously. Katerra is the most instructive example – $2 billion raised, a genuine attempt at vertical integration, and bankruptcy in 2021. More recently, Diamond Age, VEEV, and Mighty Builders all ran into their own versions of the same wall. The problem with gigafactories isn’t the manufacturing concept. It’s the capital structure. Building massive, fixed facilities requires enormous upfront investment before a single home is sold. If demand shifts, or costs run over, or a funding round falls through, there’s no cushion. The asset base becomes a liability.

Cuby’s founders spent four and a half years and over 400,000 engineering hours working out a different model before going anywhere near commercial deployment. That’s an unusually long runway on the R&D side for a construction startup, and it shows in the detail of what we saw when we visited. This isn’t a company that rushed a prototype to secure a Series A. The prototype itself took six months to build – partly because they were testing and refining the assembly process itself as they went.

For more context on how the asset-heavy versus asset-light debate has played out in modular construction, our earlier piece on the ConTech investment landscape covers the broader picture on how capital-intensive models keep running into the same structural problems.

The Three Bets Cuby Is Making

Decentralized, familiar, and cost-par from day one

Alex laid out Cuby’s differentiation across three core pillars. First: decentralized manufacturing. Rather than one giant facility, the model is built around mobile micro factories that can be deployed into local markets and service a roughly 200-mile radius each. The long-term target is 275 of these factories, with 60-70% concentrated in the US. Even at that scale, the company estimates it would produce around 55,000 homes a year – a small fraction of the two million needed annually, which tells you something about how big this market is.

Second pillar: familiarity. Cuby deliberately avoids proprietary materials and tries to look, from the outside, like conventional homebuilding. That’s a strategic choice. Conservative markets – and construction buyers are among the most conservative anywhere – don’t adopt what they can’t recognize. If the build process looks roughly familiar, with locally sourced materials, the sales cycle is shorter and regulatory hurdles are lower.

Third: cost parity. Alex was direct about this. If Cuby can’t build at or below what traditional construction costs, they’re irrelevant. The target is around $100 per square foot for a completed, erected home in the US market. That includes modular kitchens produced in-factory, triple-glazed European-style windows (which US buyers apparently come to love after initial skepticism), and plumbing modules pre-assembled for on-site connection. The finished three-bedroom prototype we walked through in the documentary looked genuinely good. Not budget-compromise quality. Spacious, well-insulated, vaulted ceilings in the living area.

Inside the R&D Center

120 engineers, and every one of them has worked the factory floor

The visit to Cuby’s Eastern European headquarters was the part of the documentary that landed hardest for a construction audience. The R&D center runs around 120 people, and one of the operating principles is that every engineer spends two to three months working as a production worker before being allowed to design anything. The reasoning is practical: engineers who’ve never operated a CNC machine design things that can’t actually be manufactured as drawn. Cuby eliminates that gap by forcing the design-to-production feedback loop to run in the same building, sometimes within 30 minutes.

The alternative – outsourcing prototype production – means a three-week lag between design and feedback. One week to calculate, one to produce, one to deliver. By the time the engineer sees the mistake, they’ve moved on to the next assumption. That kind of delay compounds fast in complex systems. Cuby’s answer is to just not have the delay at all.

What struck Martin during the walkthrough was how systematized it all was. Workers move parts between stations using trolley carts, each tagged with a QR code that delivers step-by-step instructions and a quality checklist directly to a phone. No specialist knowledge required to execute the task correctly. If something goes wrong, the worker pushes an “undo button” and a signal goes to the technical room. Engineers respond. The process resumes. It’s closer to a lean manufacturing operation than anything you’d recognize from a conventional construction site.

The Business Model and What Comes Next

Copy-paste factories, partner-funded, starting in Nevada

Cuby isn’t trying to become a home builder, at least not initially. The model is to partner with developers, GCs, or high-net-worth investors who want a turnkey path into homebuilding. Partners provide balance sheet support and commit to taking homes (offtake). Cuby supplies the factory, the operational expertise, and the ongoing technical support. Each factory is a standalone entity. The economics are compelling: at full capacity, each mobile micro factory generates $50 to $70 million in annual revenue, with a payback period of around four years. For manufacturing, that’s a strong return.

The first real-world commercial deployment is in Nevada, targeting Q1-Q2 2026. After that, the roadmap runs through four phases: get factories into the market and capture a customer base, move into supplying materials to those factories (where margins run around 30%), eventually launch Cuby’s own home-building operation drawing from the factory network, and ultimately expand beyond residential into other asset classes. It’s a patient build, deliberately so. Alex was clear that failing to scale is worse than scaling slowly.

On the automation question – which always comes up – Cuby’s position is thoughtful rather than promotional. The construction industry hasn’t done the foundational work that automotive manufacturers spent 60-plus years on before robotics became viable. You can’t automate a process you haven’t mapped and standardized. Cuby claims to have mapped the 10,000 micro-steps it takes to build a home, which positions them well for humanoid integration when that technology matures. For now, the priority is replacing skilled labor dependency with unskilled labor plus software-driven process control. That’s the real near-term unlock.

If the model that Cuby is executing interests you from an investment or competitive positioning angle, our breakdown of how Europe’s construction robotics startups are approaching hardware scale covers some of the same strategic questions from a different angle.

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