Podcast Summary: Inevitable (an MCJ podcast)

Episode Title: Modular, High-Quality Homes Built Faster and Cheaper with Cuby

Date: December 16, 2025

Host: Cody Simms, MCJ
Guest: Alex Gampel, COO and Co-founder at Cuby

Episode Overview

In this episode, Cody Simms dives into the future of housing with Alex Gampel, COO and co-founder of Cuby. Against the backdrop of America’s housing shortage, climate imperatives, and a construction industry stuck in the past, the two unpack Cuby’s innovative solution: the "mobile microfactory." Cuby aims to revolutionize homebuilding by deploying pop-up, hyper-local factories to assemble high-quality, climate-resilient homes rapidly and affordably, tackling both cost and environmental concerns.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context: America's Housing Crisis

• Rise in Homeownership Barriers:
  • "50% of the US population cannot afford a down payment on a $250,000 house, which… is half of what the average house in America costs today."
    —Alex Gampel [04:08]
• Systemic Challenges:
  • Delay in household formation is contributing to wider economic and demographic issues.
  • Millennials are increasingly finding homeownership unattainable, impacting family growth and GDP.
    —Alex Gampel [03:15]

2. Underlying Causes

• Regulatory Hurdles:
  • Building is as regulated as biotech, with up to 1-2 year delays before breaking ground.
    —Alex Gampel [04:53]
  • Deregulation is difficult as rules exist at federal, state, and especially local levels.
• Skilled Labor Shortage:
  • Construction is highly apprenticed, and there’s a looming gap as 40% of workers are set to retire in the next decade, with few replacements.
    —Alex Gampel [06:59]
  • For every seven retiring, only one new worker joins construction.

3. Housing as a Climate and Emissions Problem

• Embodied Carbon & Construction Waste:
  • "You're going to see more waste than house ... statistically about 4 tons of waste per house."
    —Alex Gampel [08:40]
  • Construction waste represents up to 20–40% of landfill contents.
• Cuby’s Environmental Impact:
  • Reduces construction waste by 95% through pre-modelled, just-in-time assembly.
  • Creates homes with steel frames and triple-pane windows, pushing durability and energy efficiency.
• Resilience to Extreme Weather:
  • Cuby homes use steel tubes and sandwich panels with R-values in the 60s, far exceeding typical insulation, making homes more climate-resilient.
  • "Most of someone's net worth is parked in their primary house. So if that goes away, your livelihood is done. We saw that in California with the fires."
    —Alex Gampel [12:06]

4. Past Failure of Modular/Prefab Solutions

• Why previous attempts (like Katerra, Veev) did not work:
  • Centralized gigafactories are capital-intensive, inflexible, and not suited to the cyclical nature of real estate.
  • Logistics of shipping large, bulky housing components are impractical—"this is by definition, shipping air." —Alex Gampel [17:44]
  • The critical bottleneck is still skilled labor, not just wall assembly—3D printing addresses only a minor part of the build.
  • Regulatory fragmentation: There are 26,000 zoning codes in the US alone.
• Essence of Cuby's Antithesis:
  • Instead of gigafactories, deploy mobile microfactories—cheap, fast-to-setup, localized, and scalable.

5. The Cuby Solution: Mobile Microfactories

• Key Concept:
  • "We ship 130 shipping containers anywhere in the world. And they quick deploy like a plug and play system… inside of the intermodal containers, we quick form production lines."
    —Alex Gampel [28:13]
  • Each microfactory serves a 150-mile radius, acting as a local manufacturing and assembly center for homes.
  • Factories are replicated at 1/20th the cost of traditional facilities, buildable in 90 days.
  • Only 4 unskilled workers (per shift) needed to assemble homes.
• Tech Stack:
  • Proprietary software for dispatching, logistics, and production management further streamlines the process.
• Output:
  • Homes with high energy efficiency and customizable layouts but standardized core components.

6. Business Model & Go-to-Market Strategy

• Who Operates the Factories?
  • Cuby functions as the general contractor, but partners (via JV) with local developers and homebuilders who guarantee a set number of orders.
  • "With time, we want to start pulling large facilities off our balance sheet to start putting them up ourselves. And our customer becomes small to medium-sized homebuilders in that geographic radius. Therefore, we're the infrastructure for how they build."
    —Alex Gampel [35:41]
• Financial Strategy:
  • Focused on cost of capital, structured as asset-level project finance to keep venture equity use minimal and risk lower.
  • Expansion is driven in coordination with offtake agreements from regional operators, ensuring demand before investing.
• Cost Analysis:
  • Target construction cost: $100/sq.ft—half of traditional methods.
    —Alex Gampel [25:35]
• Scaling Vision:
  • Long-term, Cuby sees potential for its microfactory model in multifamily housing and other large asset classes.

7. Impact and Opportunities

• Job Creation:
  • Each factory provides 350 unskilled jobs, attractive to policymakers and impactful for local economies.
• Industry Disruption:
  • "If we just stayed in housing and covered 2% ... that's a $50 billion business."
    —Alex Gampel [38:27]
  • Housing and construction are massive, under-penetrated industries for venture-backed innovation.

Notable & Memorable Quotes

• "Housing is, and should be, everyone's top of mind."
  —Alex Gampel [03:52]

• "The concept of industrialized construction is not new by any means. We're not inventing a category. It's actually common sense."
  —Alex Gampel [12:53]

• "If Jesus were to come back to earth, there's only one profession he would recognize. It's the one we're in."
  —Alex Gampel [13:20]

• "You will never see a climate related slide in our decks… If you're going to have better unit economics, figure out a way to have those unit economics also make a dent in some other problem."
  —Alex Gampel [08:40]

• "It's very important to deceptively look like traditional home building or construction. For those reasons, we've been really conscious about designing our entire kid of Parts the factory produces with non proprietary materials."
  —Alex Gampel [21:30]

• "The critical statistic: what is your cost to build per foot? If you're not going to be cheaper than traditional construction, you are dead in the water."
  —Alex Gampel [24:55]

• "Our house is not going anywhere. During a hurricane or tornado."
  —Alex Gampel [10:45]

• "If you want to launch a new McDonald's retail location, it's just a function of SOPS…That's what we've built for factories."
  —Alex Gampel [31:09]

Timestamps for Major Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |---------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Introduction to the housing crisis and Cuby’s thesis | | 04:53 | Regulatory and labor barriers in homebuilding | | 08:40 | Housing as a climate/emissions problem and what Cuby does differently | | 12:53 | The history and failure of previous prefab/modular housing startups | | 20:09 | Enter the mobile microfactory: what, why, and how | | 25:35 | Cuby’s construction cost advantage | | 26:52 | How mobile microfactories are deployed and what they look like | | 31:57 | Homes produced by Cuby: quality, customization, and experience | | 33:14 | Cuby’s business model, customer profile, and market-entry strategy | | 38:27 | Scaling outlook, future asset class expansion | | 39:54 | Financing and capital strategy | | 40:15 | What’s next for Cuby | | 41:06 | The opportunity index: construction is underfunded relative to its size |

Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive primer on the critical bottlenecks in American housing, the flaws of prior modular construction approaches, and how Cuby seeks to rewrite the playbook. By innovating on process—through mobile, hyper-local factories that minimize cost, material waste, and complexity—Cuby is positioning itself not just as a homebuilder, but as the infrastructure backbone for the next generation of affordable, climate-resilient housing.

For further learning, check out the full episode or follow Kuby’s updates about their first US microfactory in Nevada.