Companies like Cuby Technologies are coming up with innovations that streamline building, cut costs, and reduce reliance on skilled labor.
These “micro” factories occupy 30,000 square feet, fit in a mall parking lot, and produce kits for up to 200 homes per year.$550 billion in new home construction alone, $421 billion in single-family homes, and $129 billion in multifamily homes, making it one of the largest spending categories globally.
However, with 40 percent of the US construction workforce expected to retire over the next decade, the industry faces a significant skilled labor shortage. This challenge has driven Industry 4.0 companies to develop innovative solutions aimed at automating, streamlining, and decentralizing the construction process. Cuby Technologies, a US-based startup with research and development facilities in Eastern Europe, is one such company leading the way. Cuby has introduced mobile micro-factories —portable, scalable units that bring home production directly to construction sites. Unlike centralized gigafactories, Cuby’s MMFs arrive in containers that unfold on-site, removing the need for traditional warehouses. Each unit is fully equipped with tools, supplies, and worker amenities, ensuring efficiency and mobility. These “micro” factories occupy approximately 30,000 square feet, with a total land requirement of about 195,000 square feet—small enough to fit within a typical mall parking lot. Each MMF can produce kits of parts for up to 200 homes per year. The homes built using these kits resemble conventional houses and offer customization options, adapting to local zoning laws and housing regulations wherever an MMF is deployed. Aleksandr Gampel, Cuby’s co-founder and COO, explains the concept as “lean manufacturing for homebuilding” that minimizes the need for skilled labor by breaking down construction into systematic, manageable steps. This approach reduces costs and speeds up production allowing even unskilled laborers to assemble homes by following a highly detailed, digitalized instruction manual. “We have a very different take and we think the way it should be done, more practically, is you can bring a factory to the construction site. Our product is about mass producing these mobile micro-factories that we can put where there’s demand, quickly set them up and make everything that goes into a home, and then use our unskilled labor, which is very important to reduce the cost to then assemble the homes,” Gampel tellsCuby’s micro-factories approach also helps ease the housing crisis by making it financially feasible to build more homes. According to Gampel, Cuby’s MMFs have brought home construction costs down to about $100 per square foot, a meaningful reduction compared to traditional methods. Rather than becoming developers themselves, Cuby partners with local builders, empowering them to construct homes more affordably and pass the savings on to consumers. “Our business is not to be a developer. We’re truly this platform based on deep tech and a lot of pieces that we’ve taken from the engineering world and combined into a platform, a process. And our business is to copy and paste these factories with partners locally,” Gampel emphasizes. Cuby’s MMF system simplifies construction into 37 distinct stages, each designed so that unskilled workers can complete tasks accurately. This approach contrasts with traditional construction, which often requires over 20 specialized trades to build a single home. “Part of the beauty of having a mobile micro factory is we don’t need to go look for a warehouse. We don’t need to go build a building. This is fully containerized, our machines arrive in the containers. You send them anywhere in the world, on a piece of land, you can put up this perimeter. It’s the containers, the machines, deploying the stations. And this is an inflatable pneumonic structure. So, you can launch a factory anywhere where there’s demand,” Gampel says.Gampel compares this system to Toyota’s lean manufacturing model, where each step in production is precisely structured to prevent mistakes. By supplying a “kit of parts” that can be assembled on-site, Cuby not only simplifies the building process, but also allows local builders to operate without the need for skilled labor. “The way construction works today is it’s a highly skilled apprentice workforce, and it’s fragmented, meaning, just to build one home, there’s 22 different skill sets right involved in subcontractors. What we’ve done is we’ve broken up a well, two things. One, the kit of parts is easier to put together on site. We prepare everything in the factory, send it down the street, so then it’s easy to put the site,” Gampel says.Cuby plans to deploy its first MMFs in Las Vegas and Denver in the near term and aims to launch 275 factories over the next decade. The company has grown a team of 140 people and built its technology over three and a half years, all while staying financially lean compared to its competitors, as Gampel explains. “We’re putting out factories in the US. Soon we will have a pretty big R&D facility in Eastern Europe, but it’s a very complicated system. It’s about the kit of parts that make up a home. It’s about the machines that build the kit of parts, and it’s about the software that sits on top to make all this happen. But it’s all with one intention, to reduce skilled labor hours required to build homes,” he adds.to tackle housing challenges. In Georgetown, Texas, ICON’s Vulcan printer is creating the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood, featuring 100 homes in the Wolf Ranch community. ICON points out that 3D printing greatly improves efficiency in the trade market by allowing a single crew and one robot to construct a wall system, eliminating the need for multiple crews. The development is designed for high energy efficiency, with advanced insulation to protect against Texas’s extreme heat, demonstrating how 3D printing can support sustainable, resilient housing. Printing the single-story, three- to four-bedroom homes takes approximately three weeks, with traditional methods used for installing the foundation and metal roofs. The concrete walls are engineered to resist water, mold, termites, and harsh weather. ICON, which 3D-printed its first home in Austin in 2018, wants to extend its technology to the Moon. Under NASA’s Artemis program, the agency has contracted ICON to create a construction system for building landing pads, shelters, and other essential structures on the lunar surface. One of ICON’s construction systems, known as Phoenix, is a new multi-story robotic construction system designed to print an entire building enclosure, including foundations and roof structures. This system enhances speed and scale while reducing setup time and the need for operators, ultimately lowering ICON’s printing costs by 50 percent. The construction cost is lower than the latest available data for conventional wall systems, saving up to $25,000 per average American home compared to traditional methods.his vision for the future of construction, predicting that robots will handle most building tasks while AI systems manage construction data. “It is clear to me that this is the way to cut the cost and time of construction in half while making homes that are twice as good and more faithfully express the values and hopes of the people who live in them. Going forward, ICON is an AI and robotics company focused on transforming the way we build and accelerating what we believe is a very exciting future.” Ballard stated.Bojan Stojkovski is a freelance journalist based in Skopje, North Macedonia, covering foreign policy and technology for more than a decade. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, ZDNet, and Nature.
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