housing-crisis
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The Fund Betting That the World's Oldest Industry Is Finally Ready to Change
While most venture money chased apps and ad clicks, a small Atlanta firm went looking for founders willing to fix concrete, steel and 3D-printed homes. Here is how Shadow Ventures built a thesis around the industry software forgot.
Alquist 3D
Alquist 3D is a Greeley, Colorado-based construction technology company that uses robotic 3D concrete printing to build homes, commercial buildings, and infrastructure. Founded in 2020 by Zachary Mannheimer, the company completed one of the first 3D-printed Habitat for Humanity homes in the U.S. and printed an ~8,000-square-foot addition to a Walmart in Athens, Tennessee - billed as the largest 3D-printed commercial structure in the country. In late 2025 it announced a landmark deal to print more than a dozen Walmart and retail buildings, positioning itself to commercialize 3D concrete printing at national scale.
Shibusa Systems
Shibusa Systems is a Monterey, California construction-technology company reengineering how single-family homes and ADUs get built. Instead of shipping boxes from a factory, Shibusa pre-engineers every home in a digital Configurator and turns the messy jobsite into a predictable, kit-of-parts assembly it calls Precision Component On-site Assembly. The company claims it cuts build time by roughly 50%, costs by about 30%, and construction waste to under 5%, while delivering homes to Fortified Home resilience standards with low-carbon materials and no natural gas. Founded in New Orleans in 2019 and now based in Monterey, it is backed by seed funding and led by Wall Street veteran Katy Reynolds.
Patrick Callahan
Patrick Callahan is the CEO of Alquist 3D, a Greeley, Colorado company at the front of the 3D concrete printing industry. A West Point-era Army infantry officer turned defense-industry executive, he took the helm in October 2023 and steered the startup from emerging-technology curiosity into a commercial force, landing a landmark partnership with Walmart to 3D print store expansions across the country. He pairs two decades of defense business development - where he captured hundreds of millions in contracts at Critical Solutions International and AirBoss Defense Group - with a mission to make building faster, cheaper, and safer.
Reframe Systems
Reframe Systems is a Massachusetts robotics and AI company building net-zero, climate-resilient homes through a network of small, regional 'microfactories.' Founded in 2022 by three former Amazon Robotics leaders, it pairs proprietary 'pixels to parts' design software with vision-guided robotic workcells to mass-customize modular housing - cutting construction costs by roughly 35% and deploying homes in about 100 days. The company aims to make high-performance housing economically viable and to build one million resilient homes globally by 2045.
Neil Rubler
Neil Rubler is the founder and CEO of Vessel Technologies, a New York company that mass-produces small, prefabricated, solar-ready apartment buildings and sells them through the housing industry's first franchise model. After two decades running large multifamily real estate firms - Vantage Properties and then Candlebrook Properties, which oversaw more than $3 billion in assets across seven states - he left conventional development behind in 2017 to attack the so-called Missing Middle: people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market rate. A Wharton MBA and magna cum laude Cornell graduate, Rubler treats housing like a manufactured product rather than a construction project, aiming to build higher-quality homes faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.
Samara
Samara is a Redwood City-based prefab housing company building factory-made backyard homes (ADUs) for California homeowners. Spun out of Airbnb by co-founder Joe Gebbia, Samara handles the entire process from design and permitting to manufacturing and installation, with a stated goal of using accessory dwelling units to ease the West Coast housing crunch.