modular-construction
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Vikas Murali
Vikas Murali is the co-founder and CEO of Offsight, a San Francisco software company that gives prefab, modular and offsite construction factories real-time visibility into production, quality, materials and labor. A University of Pennsylvania systems engineer who cut his teeth shipping enterprise software at Texas Instruments and Barclays, Murali spent years as a consultant watching engineered-to-order manufacturers run multimillion-dollar projects on brittle spreadsheets. In 2020 he and co-founder Andrew Xue built Offsight to replace those spreadsheets with mobile-first tracking, betting that the factories building the future of housing need to prove they actually deliver on speed, cost and quality.
Chris Giattina
Chris Giattina is the founder and CEO of BLOX, a Bessemer, Alabama company that builds hospitals the way Detroit builds cars. A University of Pennsylvania-trained architect who runs the family firm Giattina Aycock (GA Studio), he turned a former Pullman railcar plant into a million-square-foot factory where acute-care medical facilities are designed, manufactured, and assembled using his Design-Manufacture-Construct (DMC) method. His pitch is a clean equation: buildings at twice the quality, twice the speed, and twice the value - what he calls 2x2x2.
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.
Joe Garcia
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.
Rick Holliday
Rick Holliday is a San Francisco Bay Area real estate developer and social entrepreneur with nearly 50 years of experience building affordable and market-rate housing. He co-founded Factory OS in 2017 to revolutionize multifamily housing production through factory-based modular construction, securing $77.7M in funding from Google, Autodesk, Facebook, and Citi. His career spans co-founding Eden Housing (1978), BRIDGE Housing (early 1980s), and Holliday Development (1988), where he pioneered live-work loft conversions in SoMa. Factory OS, located in a former WWII submarine shipyard on Mare Island in Vallejo, demonstrated 40% faster delivery and 20-30% cost savings over traditional construction.