modular-homes
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Plywood Rots. Supersede Extrudes Its Replacement From the Plastic Nobody Wanted.
Sean Petterson sold his last hardware company after raising more than $60 million. Now he is in Phoenix extruding recycled polypropylene into a board that boatbuilders are bolting into 2026 hulls - and he wants a micro-factory in every city with a plastic problem.
Aro Homes
Aro Homes is a Silicon Valley home-building company that designs and delivers precision-engineered, net-zero single-family homes for established neighborhoods. By combining a repeatable off-site/on-site construction system with architecture from Olson Kundig, Aro aims to cut the typical 18-month build down to roughly 90 days while producing homes that generate more energy than they use, cut water consumption by up to 45%, and save an estimated 11.2 tons of CO2 per home each year. The company launched publicly in 2022 with a $21M Series A and treats housing as a repeatable product rather than a series of one-off custom builds.
Verustruct
Verustruct is a New Haven-based construction-technology company building a gantry-less 3D printing system to make affordable, sustainable housing at scale. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Nick Callegari, its patent-pending translational slipform printer extrudes load-bearing walls with embedded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, then scales itself up layer by layer, sidestepping the bulky gantry frames that cap the size of most additive-construction projects. Organized as a public benefit corporation, Verustruct aims to cut home construction cost by roughly half and emissions by around 40 percent.
Rentberry
Rentberry is a San Francisco-based proptech company building an end-to-end, AI-powered rental ecosystem that lets tenants and landlords handle the entire rental lifecycle online - from search, virtual tours, applications and automated tenant screening, to digital lease signing, rent collection and ongoing maintenance. Founded in 2015 by Ukrainian entrepreneurs after a frustrating San Francisco apartment hunt, the platform now spans roughly 90 countries and uses AI agents to analyze listings, generate property descriptions, negotiate pricing and coordinate move-in services. The company has expanded into a chain of furnished modular homes and is preparing for a planned public listing under the NASDAQ ticker RNTB.
Oleksiy Lubinsky
Oleksiy Lubinsky (also known as Alex Lubinsky) is the co-founder and CEO of Rentberry, a San Francisco-based platform that automates the long-term rental process from search and custom-offer negotiation to digital leases, rent payments and maintenance. A Ukrainian native and UC Berkeley economics graduate who came out of investment banking, he sold his first company, the networking app City Hour, in 2015 before launching Rentberry that same year. He has pushed the company through one of crypto's most-talked-about ICOs, an AI rebrand, and serial equity-crowdfunding rounds, framing Rentberry as a bid to strip the friction, fees and middlemen out of renting.
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.