offsite-manufacturing
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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.
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.