offsite-manufacturing
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The Factory Hidden Inside a Skyscraper
FullStack Modular began with a 32-story experiment that ran late, went to court, and still changed what a factory-built building could be. Now the company is betting that the lesson was never “build boxes faster” - it was “redesign the whole sequence.”
They Tried to Build Apartments Like Airplanes - Then the Construction Site Fought Back
Sustainable Living Innovations spent 16 years turning apartment towers into a kit of parts. Its Seattle buildings prove the hardware works - and its bruising flagship reveals why fixing construction takes more than a factory.
Daniel Blank
Daniel Blank is the CEO and co-founder of Toggle, a construction robotics company he started in New York in 2016 to bring manufacturing methods to the built environment, beginning with the fabrication and assembly of steel rebar for reinforced concrete. A designer by training who spent a decade running a design agency, Blank re-imagined the one-off construction process as a repeatable product-manufacturing process after watching workers tie thousands of steel bars by hand at a wind farm. Toggle has raised roughly $15 million from investors including Point72 Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Blackhorn Ventures and Mark Cuban, and has since expanded into automated quality control for custom fabricators under the Toggle QC banner.
Toggle Robotics
Toggle Robotics is a New York-based construction-technology company that applies industrial robots, computer vision and software to the pre-assembly and inspection of steel reinforcement (rebar) and other fabricated parts. Founded in 2016 by Daniel Blank and Ian Cohen, Toggle built a full-stack system - robotic hardware plus its Toggle OS software - that turns construction drawings into automated manufacturing programs, cutting labor cost and lifting output on civil infrastructure, energy and high-rise projects. The company has since extended into inline quality control with Toggle QC, which scans fabricated parts on the production line to confirm critical features before parts ship.
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.
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.