Vikas Murali

Vikas Murali runs Offsight, the software his factories open before the first weld of the day. It is a project management platform for prefab, modular and offsite construction - the world where buildings are manufactured indoors in pieces, then shipped and snapped together on site. His customers are factory owners. His job is to tell them what is actually happening on their own shop floors, in real time, on a phone.

That sounds obvious. It was not. For years the offsite construction industry built apartment blocks, hospitals and schools while tracking production, quality, materials and labor inside spreadsheets that were never designed for the work. A cell here, a tab there, a version emailed at midnight. Murali watched it happen up close and kept asking the same question: if you cannot see what your factory did today, how do you know you delivered what you sold?

He is, by his own description, an engineer first. "I'm a technical person and I'm actually an engineer by training," he says. "I have a degree in systems engineering." That degree is from the University of Pennsylvania, class of 2010, with a minor in economics - a useful pairing for someone who would spend his career standing between machines and money.

Before Offsight he shipped enterprise software at large companies. Texas Instruments. Barclays. The kind of places where a product launch involves a hundred stakeholders and a thousand edge cases. He learned how big software gets built, broken and fixed. Then, starting around 2014, he stepped into prefabrication as a consultant, helping some of the world's largest engineered-to-order manufacturers wire up systems for production management, quality control, materials tracking and labor.

The consulting work, including engagements with manufacturers like Schneider Electric, became the field research for a company. He and co-founder Andrew Xue kept seeing the same gap. The off-the-shelf software built for traditional construction did not fit. The software built for automotive assembly did not fit either. Project manufacturers live in a strange middle. "You're not making a widget over and over again," Murali says. "You exist in a unique world - project manufacturing." Every job is a little different, which is exactly why a rigid factory system and a loose spreadsheet both fail.

In 2020 they built Offsight from scratch to live in that middle. The platform handles prefab planning and scheduling, production and quality tracking, material cost and waste control, factory labor utilization, and document management and compliance. The pitch is plain: replace the guesswork with a record. Murali frames it as a test of the industry's own marketing. "All those things that you're trying to sell to your customers - who knows whether you're truly delivering on them," he says. Offsight's answer is to measure all three promises the sector loves to make: faster, cheaper, better.

There is a tagline he keeps close - "Built By the Industry." Features come from the people holding the tablets: shop-floor operators, quality inspectors, plant managers, executives. It is a deliberately unglamorous way to build software, and it is the whole strategy. The mission underneath it reads like a manifesto for a sector under pressure from a housing shortage: Building Better, Greener, Affordable.

What makes Murali interesting is that he did not just build a company in this world - he started narrating it. Through Offsight he runs a Leaders & Innovators interview series, sitting down with the people shaping modular construction, from the CEO of Vantem to the former CEO of Autodesk. He has taken the guest chair too, on the Modular Building Institute's Inside Modular podcast and on Constructed Futures, talking through labor scarcity, rising costs, and why visibility inside a prefab factory may be the single biggest thing standing between modular construction and real scale.