prefabrication
(9)
BASE4 - Architects, Engineers, Designers
A Boca Raton firm decided architecture should behave more like a factory than an atelier - so it wired together designers on four continents into a 24-hour workday and pointed the whole thing at one goal: build faster and cheaper.
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.
Offsight
Offsight is a San Francisco software company building a project management and production platform for the offsite construction, modular and prefab industry. Its mobile-first software helps factories and specialty contractors track production, quality, materials and labor in real time - replacing the spreadsheets that engineered-to-order manufacturers have long relied on. Founded in 2014 by Vikas Murali and Andrew Xue, the company raised a $2.5M seed round and counts large builders like Performance Contracting Inc., McCarthy Building Companies and Z Modular among its customers.
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.
Stratus
Stratus is a cloud-based BIM-to-fabrication platform built for MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) contractors. It connects the digital model - Revit, AutoCAD and Autodesk Fabrication - to the prefab shop and the field, handling spooling, smart labeling, bend sheets, weld maps, material tracking and real-time productivity metrics so trade contractors can move from design to installed pipe, duct and conduit with less waste and fewer manual handoffs. Developed by GTP Software, Inc. (formerly GTP Services), Stratus serves large mechanical and sheet-metal contractors across North America and raised a $32M Series B in 2025.
BLOX
BLOX is a Bessemer, Alabama company that builds hospitals the way Detroit builds cars. Using its own Design Manufacture Construct (DMC) method, BLOX engineers and fabricates complete medical modules - patient rooms, exam rooms, trauma centers, headwalls and bathrooms - inside a million-square-foot former railcar factory, then ships them across the country to be assembled on site. Founded in 2010 out of architecture firm GA Studio, BLOX has grown to roughly 600 employees and bills itself as the largest manufacturer of modular healthcare buildings in the United States.
California Drywall Co.
California Drywall Co. is one of the largest wall-and-ceiling specialty contractors in the United States, building interiors and exteriors across Northern California since 1946. From its San Jose base it delivers drywall, lath and plaster, metal framing, cold-formed steel engineering, fireproofing, acoustical ceilings, rainscreens and prefabricated wall panels for landmark projects including Apple Park, Levi's Stadium, SFO Terminal 2 and major hospitals. In August 2023 it became a 100% employee-owned company through an ESOP, putting equity in the hands of its roughly 700 team members.
Jake Olsen
Jake Olsen, P.E. is the CEO of Stratus, the leading cloud software platform for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors, helping hundreds of firms digitize workflows from BIM design through fabrication to field installation. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in construction technology, Olsen previously co-founded DADO - a construction document management startup that was acquired by Stanley Black & Decker - and also built Hangerworks, DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design. He steered Stratus to a $32 million Series B funding round in January 2025 led by Radian Capital, positioning the company as the connective tissue between the design table, fabrication shop, and job site in the evolving era of data-driven MEP contracting.