I'm so excited to talk to you guys. I think that one of the coolest things about this
company is that it adheres to Elon's vision of the
world with his company. So often when Elon talks about his companies,
he says, you know, yeah, sure. Tesla's building cars. Sure. SpaceX is
building rockets, but the real product is the factory, the factory that
builds the rockets, the factory that builds the cars. And so for you guys, it
really, to me, it seems like your product is the factory that builds the homes.
A hundred percent. Everything was built day one with scale in
mind. After all, our goal is 275 mobile micro
factories out in the wild. There's no way to do that, not having the
factory be the product. Oleg can go more into this because day
one, he was thinking about how it's all the system. And Oleg, I mean, you
Yeah, well, I'm 100% agree with Alex. And in the
beginning of the project, we began to think how we will scale the business. And
that's why everything that we're doing, we try to fit to
this process, how we will scale and how we will just open new and
new fact and supply, you know. If we change something,
we change the machines, we change the parts and so on. But all
Totally. Because I mean, at the end of the day, you guys are building homes. That's like the thing that's coming
out of the factory. And the thing that if you if you weren't building homes, then
you would make no revenue. It's not as you can build a factory and then, you know, that
had to do nothing, obviously. Like the point of it is to build homes.
And so one way to build a better home is to basically
do it yourself. Like you two are out in the field. hammer
in a way, like whatever, installing the things yourselves, just like we're like
working really hard like that. But obviously, like that's not something that's
going to scale to a venture meaningful business. Like ultimately, I
think like after looking into it, I think maybe the simplest way to describe what you
guys are doing is that you're building better tools for home
builders, right? Like, in theory, your your tool
could be just like a magical screwdriver or something. That's like the
greatest installation tool that makes it so much easier and faster and cheaper. Of
course, you're not building magical screwdrivers, you're building other stuff. But would
you mind telling us just like what those things are, very high level,
Yeah, I think you hit it on the nail. I mean, anyone can build a home. Historically,
it's not hard to build a home. There's lots of folks that are fragmented out
there across the world that build homes. The harder part is
how do you make a tool, like you said, which for us is our product, which is a mobile micro
factory to enable home building with a lot less skilled labor.
which in turn reduces cost and generally reduces the
labor hours required to build a home. How do you do that on mass scale? How
do you do it in a cost effective way? That's the hard part. That's
why we had to think about the system. The byproduct, the homes, that's
just, like I said, a byproduct of that system. Our tool,
like you say, is a mobile microfactory. It is what exactly I'm sure
your viewers are imagining it to be. It's literally a containerized solution.
We bring that wherever there's demand. We erect it in a matter of
weeks, so literally shove a bunch of our proprietary machines which
are stations that I'll describe what they do, but we shove them into containers, inflate
up mnemonic structure, which all I can show you are R&D centers in one
of them, so you can give a quick tour in a bit. And we basically
create a perimeter that forms a temporary decentralized
manufacturing facility. Within it, we do one
of two things. One, we make things from scratch. So things
like frames or windows or helical piers, So
certain elements of a home that we take a raw input turn into a
finished good. And then other things that are a bit more basic and off the
shelf like the sheetrock behind your wall or my wall or
PEX pipes that form the plumbing or wires that
we're pre-cotting prepping. But the idea is we do two of those things,
we package them into stages, basically everything
that a home is comprised of, and get to send that down the street because our
factories are proximate to where the actual construction is happening. And
then we get to assemble those kit of parts into finished homes. But
our product is the entire system, and its byproduct are
I can add, we can look at our job from a
little bit different angle. You explained that we come
up with a new screwdriver, but still the GC,
they have the same process. But in our case, we provide to them also
the different process, how to do the same job. And to this
process, we provide to them all the tools, but this is vice versa
tools that they're using, right? It's a software, it's
machines, and so on. And I can explain that. The construction process
is a project management process, where there is one guy
who controls the construction, who push everybody, and
if something will happen growing in this waterfall, everything
will crop. In manufacturing, the process is
set up in an absolutely different way where there is a conveyor. And
in this conveyor, one process controls another one. And
that's why it's more stable stuff. And that's why we
set up the KUBI as a manufacturing conveyor,
starting from the materials and design, and
finishing with assembling. That's why assembling team, it's also
part of the conveyor. It's employees of the factories. That's
why all of this process is absolutely different now. Now
Yeah, totally. Which is a unique way to think about home
building, right? Because normally you don't think about home building as like a
factory process, like Henry Ford or something. You're not thinking of
But the interesting thing is there's parameters. It's almost tough
to recall what we're doing, what Henry Ford
did with cars, because if you recall, Henry Ford said, you
can have any car you want as long as it's black and it's the Model T or
whatever. In home building, it's a bit different because folks
require customization. Those folks being end consumers, developers,
et cetera, they require different sizes of homes, layouts, finishes. Not
all the same homes work for the same lot in which you're placing
the home. So our system It's pretty dynamic
in the sense that we needed to innovate within parameters that exist.
Those parameters are regulatory. Those parameters are around customization. So
there's, you know, I know you're in space, that's really your
domain expertise in space. You get to kind of go from A to B in any
engineering possible solution you need to just to make sure it works. Here
we're confined by a box and that box has so many parameters from lenders
to regulators that we had to innovate within it. So we can't just
go full 180. So some of the principles that we
have in this space is, okay, decentralized manufacturing, that's
one approach, and we'll get into why that needs to be the case. But our
second and third pillars are around Familiarity of end product, meaning
we can't over-engineer a home. It has to be the same home that's been built before. And
two, cost. So those two things are very, very important, and
What's the simplest way that you could describe where technology
enters the process, basically? So think about it as
at one end is like the dumbest home building technology in the
world, like we're using hammers and nails and like printed
out blueprints and it just like the one guy has to know how to interpret all
the blueprints on the other end is like tech utopia home
building like nobody you I personally me Christian could
go like build a home tomorrow just myself like where do
you guys fall I'm sure this is different for different parts of the process but like what are the
It's interesting because in theory, you, Christian, could go build
a home tomorrow. Homes are not a very sophisticated thing. They're actually
not as high quality as people think they are. There's lots of
mistakes and lots of standard deviation worth of mistakes, et cetera. It's
really a function of the labor hours it would take you. So you would
be building your home for three years probably, right? I mean,
technology hasn't really evolved in the construction sector. In
fact, construction workers today are less productive than they were in
the 1970s. It's a function of a lot of things. It's mainly probably
a function of the aging demographic in the space. Average
construction sites are 40 to 50 years old, right? It's
a very labor intensive field. So we've gotten
less productive, and there is also physically less hands that are capable of
building the amount we need to build. So for us, technology solves
the skilled labor piece, that's the pleading, and the labor hours required, which
helps bring down costs because it physically takes less time. I
would say our IP is layered in several, I'd
say like three and a half steps. One, it's the
factory itself. So 50% of the machines inside the factory, we
make ourselves. They're proprietary to us and some of them are
pretty complicated. Some of them are all like getting gray hair over
some of them. And some of them are simple, like certain
shelving systems that didn't exist in the market, but help our lean manufacturing process
specifically. So the factory itself is, you
know, there's IP around it. Even things as simple as shoving machines into
containers, you know, that's hard. You got to make four dozen custom
shipping containers for every factory. You have to certify them because you
have to ship them globally. Once you change the structural integrity of a container, you
can no longer insure it. So like even little things like that, you chop
a solution off and it's like a Medusa's head. There's 10 other things you got to solve. The
second layer I would say is the end product. So the kit of parts
that go into the home. Yes, they're basic. Yes, they're compliant, but
there's still certain nuances to them that allow them to be assembled on site
in a quick manner. The third is around software. So
our entire factory, entire processes are It's
all our software. There's no software at the shelf. So there's an entire OS to
running the factory and the processes. And the half other step,
I said three and a half, that's really know-how. It's hard to do what we're doing. That's
why, you know, when it comes to IP, it's almost hard to believe in IP because
if someone can do this, we should probably go work for them. I know that's Oleg's number
one belief. But relative to traditional construction,
I mean, traditional construction is swinging a hammer, a very skilled carpenter,
basically, a home off-the-shelf
technology, some proprietary technology, but it's mostly Toyota's production system
at play, is to create a repeatable process, a
quality repeatable process that debundles from skilled labor. Oleg,
maybe you want to add from like how you feel about the technological piece
Well, first of all, when you have project management
system, you need to use professional guys.
And how we can determine that the guy is professional? He know what
to do and he have still how to do it with a
high quality. We solve this problem with
unskilled labor, I explain you how. The first of them, with
exact distributed software and a lot of construction, plus
an Unreal Engine, we exactly say unskilled
labor what he need to do right now and automatically generate
to him video instruction what he need to do to take this
piece and put it here. After that, there is an education
system that we educate him to use a screwdriver and
so on, and he passes through the education testing system, and only
after that the system gives him the task to do that, regarding, you
know, to do quality job. All the kit of
parts that we design, we design in such manner that
the guy have no chance to make a
mistake. It's only click-click system and
the design of all of these kit of parts this way that unskilled
labor need to install it and the system automatically install
it in that place where it should be installed. That's why all
the job, when we can't digitally determine
the quality of the job, we take off of the process. For
example, to paint, to paint the wall. How
you can determine the quality of how you paint the wall? It's
very relative. One guy tell you that you painted good,
another one tell that you painted bad. In
this way, we have finishes panels that
already produce in the factory with a click system that
you just go on to put it on the wall, click it,
and that's it. And that's why all the jobs that we're
doing in our system, we use this philosophy. And
in this case, we can take anybody from the street, unskilled
labor guy. He pass through our testing technology,
tools, machines, and so on. And after that, he
go to the construction site on the factory and the
system give him exact task what he need to do right now. I
will explain a little bit more. The construction consist
of 30 stages. For us. Each
stages, yeah, 30-35 stages. The first stage is foundation. The second
stage is, for example, framing, walls, and so on. We have a
software. In this software, we design the house and the system
automatically divide all the job and all the
kit of parts that we need to produce based on the stages and
gives a task to the factory what the factory need to produce
to exact house that we need to build and exact, you
know, stages and packs and kit of parts that we need
to produce and deliver to them. After that, Unreal
Engine system automatically based on this plan generate the
video instruction to each role in each stage because
we write this scenario, automatically scenario
to each state. And the system generate the
video based on this scenario, what they need to do,
what they need to take and where they need to put. And
based on that, the system controlled by the
plan, it's like Uber for the worker. It's a software where
the system gives a distributed task to all
the participants of the construction site, what they need to
do right now. And it's looking like that. You take
the phone, push the button, and there is a task. Next two
hours, you need to do this. And there is exact video
what he need to do. When you finish, you push the button,
and the system give the task to his master, to
his, you know, leader. He need to check. And he also
have the scenario of how he can check. He push the button, and
only after that, the system begin to generate another task. That's
why this is a very complicated algorithm that helps
us to distribute and to teach a lot of people and to
Well, I guess being humble, it's easy when it's one home, but imagine 20 different
homes within a 150-mile radius of each
mobile microfactory, and it's all happening at the same time at
And plus, all of them have different designs, but All
the designs consist of final numbers of kid of
parts. We have final numbers of kid of parts and based on the shape
and the size of the building we have different numbers of each of
them. And based on that, automatically generate video instruction,
tasks to manufacturing, tasks to assemble, tasks to instruction
I love that. First of all, I love that it's Unreal Engine. Like that is so cool.
And it's, if people haven't actually played around at Unreal Engine, they like might
not get it. It is such a powerful tool for so much more than just
100%. And we use also Unreal Engine for
the additional reality, because when
we give the task to the unstilled labor,
for the next two hours, what you need to do, on the phone, she pushes
the button, and she exactly see where she
need to install this or that style. And in
this additional reality, she point out where
she installed, what part he installed already.
And when she's ready, the system knows that this stuff is already installed
and it gives another task. And in this additional reality, this
part is ready. And for the new one, he sees a
The analogy goes like this of what we've done and why it's amazing. Imagine
you bought an IKEA table. It's a yellow IKEA table and it came with
a set level of instructions. But now imagine what would need
to happen to those instructions if that table constantly changed
from its size to the amount of legs it has to the colors. So
the assembly instructions would need to dynamically change to
correspond to that. So we've created. a dynamically changing
instruction manual for every sub-assembly step. It
uses Unreal Engine essentially. So it's a pretty complicated thing
to do. But that's the funny thing is like that's just one small
tiny piece of the software that, you know, there's boring stuff
like HR management for the factory that we've built in-house or like batching
the kit of parts to different sites at any given point, like which kit
So before we get too far into like the details, cause we're going to dive into this all
in super detail later. I think like, could we take one step
back and basically, can you tell us how many homes a factory can
build? How many like floor plans or whatever are supported by
that? Um, and then also just how far along you guys are. Cause you
guys actually have a mobile micro factory. It's not like this is some theoretical future thing.
It's like happening now. So can you tell us that like super high level, like what
Yeah, I think we should have probably started with an intro in a way. Kubi, you
know, we're a full stack hardware software business. We focus
in the construction space, mostly single family homes, eventually
will evolve to different asset classes. But we design, develop
and deploy mobile micro factories, aka that's our product. That's
what we talked about. Those mobile micro factories, they then manufacture
and assemble a lot of homes at scale. We've
been at this for four years now, we're about 350,000 engineering
hours into this. These mobile micro factories, they
can do about 200 single family homes a year. The
reason why that's relevant, and that number is not impressive, the
number that's impressive for us is the amount of output relative
to the cost to launch a factory. So we've productized the
factory, and part of productizing a factory is how can you reduce
the capex, so the capital required to launch one of these in
any locale because our business is to replicate copy and
paste these as many times as possible. But it's the
relatively low capex required to launch this. And if we articulate that
number, a lot of folks that, especially for manufacturing, sometimes don't
believe us. And that number is around 10 million. Zero to
60 full factory launched. And it will spit out about 200 single family
homes from foundation to interior finish over
And how expensive is this relative to the legacy technology?
Yeah, so I think let's take a step back. The reason why we get to reduce costs
so significantly, and that's a very important adoption metric because
incumbents, they have no incentive to adopt a new process, new technology,
something different if it's not cheaper. So for us, it
was vital to go to market knowing that we can build in
a very cost-effective way that's, you know, at least that cost parity,
but really it needs to be cheaper than existing incumbents. Right
now, out of the dollar that it costs to build a home, about 70% in
first-world countries is associated to skilled labor, meaning human
labor hours who happen to be skilled. Because we can debundle
from skilled labor, our 70% coefficient goes
down by quite a lot, so we can reduce costs by
a pretty significant factor. Today in the U.S., you know,
it's about $185 a foot to build a home. We
can deliver homes today with a factory nearby at about $100 a
foot. So it's a pretty significant cost savings. We're
talking about everything included from off-site factory labor
to on-site assembly labor to the cogs, so the kit
of parts. basically a home from foundation to interior finish
Totally. I mean, and is that, um, of the like, you know, $85 of
cost reduction or whatever, how much of that is coming from labor savings?
70% of the cost. It's a cost of labor plus subcontracting. We
use this portion. It's a standard method, standard operations that
I did a lot of time in other areas. When I begin to
use of manufacturing lean approach and machinery and
the conveyors were used labor force roughly 10 times. And
when we would use the 70%, roughly 10 times, plus
we are not using the subcontractors, we'll produce everything ourself.
We'll produce ourselves, windows, glass panes, and so on. And
the factory only consumes the raw material, not using,
you know, other subcontractors. And that's why, well,
as Alex explained, that we would use more than two times the
self-cost. based on
that, in this 80%, $80 that we would use
the cost, well, we would use it, not
only the skilled labor, we take only the profit from
the local vendors who supply windows, glass
We get to take away someone's margin that otherwise, you know, for
example, a window, right? There's a manufacturer, then there's
a wholesaler, then there's, you know, a reseller, then there's an installer. So,
you know, the window, Oh, to my right over here, it's been
marked up four or five times before it ever got to the construction site. So
there's certain things we also get to produce some meaningful things that cost
We try to make ourselves. I can imagine that this is actually sort of hard
to explain to people when you're first doing it, just because
there's so much, you know, like you're doing all this stuff from like, there's
the software element of you have this like super dynamic IKEA
instructions that teach someone how to anybody to how to build a house. There's the
hardware side, which is the actual factory itself. You're building new machines. You're
building this way to churn out parts, put them in pallets, and
ship them to a job site. There's even
more. There's the people side, like you said, how
you're organizing everybody and the way that people are being sent around to different tasks.
That sounds different. I think like maybe the simplest
way to dive into it a little deeper would be to just sort of like break it down into those individual
sections. So maybe I would propose like, well, we'll see if
this actually works out. But I would propose like, like people process technology.
Like, let's start by talking about who are the people that are on your job sites?
Who are who are you working with? Like you mentioned subcontractors, you
mentioned GCs earlier. Like, let's talk about who those people are normally and who they
are for you guys. Then we can talk about process, like the factory
aspect of it. And then, then let's loop back to technology and talk about
more like, what are those machines in the factory? And you
know, what are the magical screwdrivers that you guys are building to make this thing actually work?
So if that frame works, let's, let's start with people in a normal home,
like normally when a, when a contractor or like a general contractor goes
out, like, what does that, what did that look like? Like, do you have to
like bid on the construction of a home? Are general contractors working with home
Yeah. So why don't we explain first, like what, what a typical home in
the U S consists of, how it's built, et cetera. Cause I think, you
know, it's, it's so funny. It's like one of those things like electricity, right. People turn
on the lights and they just, it just happens. I mean, most folks don't
understand what goes into building a home. And obviously that's
a really big issue right now, given most of the US can't, I think 50% of
the market can't afford a $250,000 home. And we're not building
enough of them. There's literally $2 trillion worth of homes that we have to build, which
is what we're tapping into. But anyways, when you build a home, there's a
lot of stakeholders involved. So for example, you start with
a landowner or developer or home builder. Generally, let's
call it a developer, because I think that's a term that most folks are familiar with. that
developer will go acquire a piece of land. Then they have to hire, and
why developers are often compared to orchestrators, you know,
in an orchestra, what do they call the guy with the wand? Conductor. Yeah,
conductor, there you go. So developers are like conductors because they're really
orchestrating all the moving pieces. So they have to hire an architect.
They eventually have to hire civil engineers, surveyors, then a general
contractor who then hires a bunch of subcontractors, everyone
from excavators to foundation contractors to carpenters,
you know, who frame the house, to electricians, to plumbers, to HVAC technicians, drywall
installers, painters. I'm probably missing a bunch. But, you know, basically to
build a home, there's these 10 big categories of things that need to
happen. And then I think the National Association of Home Builders dives
into like the 36 subcategories or so. But the
idea is there's so many fragmented, moving pieces where it's not
like, you know, I guess it's not like if
you were to walk into Apple and buy a Mac, right? Like you're buying a Mac. There's all suite
of software, et cetera. It's a product here. you have to orchestrate
this entire product and everyone is misaligned from an incentive perspective. When
it comes to those people, then there's kind of process on
top of it. So first, the developer buys a piece of land, they
have to secure financing, then they have to go through a very complicated
process of permits and all the different legalities, meaning that
an architect eventually has to produce drawing sets, meaning here's
what I'm building, Here's it compliant with code. They submit it to
their local township and they get approvals to physically start constructing. And
first you start with site preparation. Then you put down the foundation. Then
you have to frame the home. Then you have to install all the systems. So
electrical, plumbing, HVAC, et cetera. Then you
have to insulate, put in the drywall, paint the drywall. Then
you have to do exterior interior finishes, right? Like cabinets and
the appliances and the lighting, et cetera. And all throughout
that process, you have inspectors that are showing up to
essentially check boxes saying this is legally allowed or hey,
you need to fix this. Once that's done, you get a final inspection and
then you TCO the home, meaning you get certificate of occupancy and
then end user can go live in that home. All of that takes nine to
14 months. Right now, it takes literally a
dozen plus people It's hard to build a home and there's
a lot of moving pieces. That's a typical home and it's very
Who are the people that are building that basically? Who are
the home builders in that scenario? How is
For me, it's weird because I come from commercial real estate and commercial real estate,
the developer is always the person taking the most risk orchestrating the
pieces and home building ecosystem. If you think about like
a Lennar was one of the top largest home builders in the US
or the GR Horton or, you know, uh, Toll Brothers folks
might know those names. They're publicly traded. Their stocks have done really well despite interest
rates. Basically, homebuilders, essentially, they're never the,
generally, they're never the group that's actually building. They're the developers.
So a homebuilder is synonymous with a developer. These homebuilders hire
general contractors locally because a lot of them,
at least the big ones, they operate on a national scale. There's no way they have general
contracting ability in every market. Therefore, they have to hire a
local group that oversees the construction, who hires all these third parties
that oversee all these subgeneral contracting
work. But Home builder different from general contractor.
General contractor is who physically builds the home. What we replace
and where we come in is we are a tool for home builders, but
we serve the function of a general contractor and all the subcontractors.
We replace that entire equation. So we are a turnkey solution
for a home builder that gives us their plans. Once they get that permit-ready legality
to build, we step in and build the home or the factory does
Got it. And maybe this is the right time to talk about sort of
the demographic problem and, you know, who are the people that are, you
know, at the end of the day, like, who are the people that are on the job site, like actually doing
the thing and, you know, creating, like, hammering things
and installing things. Like, do you want to talk about who that normally
would be and talk about the skilled labor stuff, but then also talk about who
We obviously look very different. Oleg actually hates when we get called a
construction company because we want to be and look like and
everything we do is more akin to manufacturing. And that's important because it
also translates to the type of people we hire and use, etc. In
traditional construction today, you know, a construction worker is exactly
what you'd picture a construction worker to be. And ironically, given
that, you know, the sphere of work that all of us here are on,
I guarantee that like you, Christian, don't know a single construction worker. You
don't even have a third cousin that's a construction worker. Uh, I for sure
living in New York city, don't know a single construction worker. Uh, all my
friends don't know a single construction worker, et cetera. That's exactly what's happening
is there's no incentive these days and no
one wants to be a construction worker. It's a physical industry. It's very
labor intensive. It's, not the best working conditions. It's
prone to injury risk, et cetera. You don't age well into
this industry. However, today, the average construction worker is
40 to 50 years old. Kind of scary to think about considering that
almost 40% of the workforce in construction is
going to retire in the next 10 years. So who's going to build America? Who's
going to build the homes we need, the buildings, the bridges, et cetera? So
it's a big problem. And for every seven folks that now retire, only
one replaces them. So solutions like ours need
to exist. Venture is very excited to back solutions in
this space, mainly because you have this massive, most vital
sector to any economy in every country is construction, but
you have a very depleting workforce. How do you go build what you need
to build? So it's least amount of efficiency, massive TAM, venture and
investors get pretty excited, but it's hard. So
we replaced that typical skilled laborer that
exists to go do the pieces of the construction process and replace them
with unskilled labor. So we can hire, you know, the same worker
that Amazon hires in their warehouse, or even a barista from Starbucks,
given that there's different stages to who we train, who the workers are.
I can add why, you know, I don't like when Alex explain us
as a construction company, Well, 50% of
the guys, the engineers who is working in KUBI, their
main motivation, they want to destroy the construction industry because
each of them build a home with the construction workers. He
do the renovation of his house, something like that. And
that's why they feel all the pain in the industry and they understand that
the industry is totally dysfunctional in comparison with manufacturing
because the process is different. And also the quality of
the job is very low in the construction everywhere because the
quantity of toilets, the quantity of the tools
that they use, the uniforms or
something like that, it's not hard for people to go to
the construction industry and we want to change Because in our KUBI,
in construction, on the construction site, we have a separate, you
know, two ship containers where there's a locker, you
know, shower, bathroom, all the tools, everything. And
well, me personally, sometimes I go
to the construction site and I work myself in the stages because
I need to feel everything myself. And that's why when I work
there, you know, I feel myself much
better because the environment that
we create for the construction workers in the construction
site and the same as in the office. And they have no difference to
work in the office on the construction site. And that's why we additionally,
you know, do the additional motivation to
Using Strata makes all of your identity tools stronger, connecting any
app with any service that you want to use. Strata's Identity Orchestration
platform separates the identity logic from your applications, so
you can optimize existing IAM tools and manage them from
a single control plane. So in short, building an identity fabric with
Strata will allow you to secure non-standard legacy apps,
keep your complex access policies, retire outdated identity
providers, and get everything done in record time. Visit strata.io
slash firstprinciples and get a free pair of AirPods Pro when
you share your identity priorities with the Strata team. Connect today at
strata.io slash firstprinciples. Let's get back to the show. So
what is the process of recruiting people to be on your job site
look like versus recruiting somebody to be on a normal job site? I imagine that
So we have to think of it this way. The reason why we wanted to localize
manufacturing is because you literally put your finger on a
map. Anywhere in the U.S., there's thousands of homes that need to be built. Our
thesis is lower capex, good
output of manufacturing. We only need 200 homes a
year to be incredibly profitable per factory. Incredibly profitable. And
you pick any dot on the map, there's demand for it, especially if
we can undercut the market in terms of cost. When it comes to a
full-capacity factory, we're employing about 260 people
per factory. There's 35 folks in
two shifts on the construction, sorry, on the factory
floor, so each mobile microfactory. And then there's, say,
20 construction sites happening within a 150-mile radius. There's
four unskilled folks in two shifts per construction site. That's
another 160. So 35 times two shifts plus four times 20 times
2, it's another 160. So the delta between 260 and
the summation of those two numbers is really the just
regular GNA of like janitors, like supply person, management of
the factory, etc. But all in all, 260 people. to
produce 200 homes a year. It's actually really
favorable and given those are mostly unskilled, it's much easier
And you guys actually have part of that as part of your process though, right? Like
if there was a person who's setting up a factory, you've also extended this
like, here are the steps in like a very easy way. You've extended that
We have an entire HR system in the OS, hiring,
training a person, payroll, all built in. Like we didn't API with
like rippling or something. We built it all in-house. It's relatively simple,
but it just works so much better when it's for our purposes. So
Okay. Humor me. I think that there are sort of
like in my head there are two sort of models for how
you might build a tech company in terms of the people you're selling your product to.
Number one is the Amazon Death Star model where
basically like you take everything you try to build
the perfect you not only try to build the distribution system but you also like
build your own products that you eventually sell to the end customers, and
you're really taking it totally end-to-end. Amazon
Basics is now taking how much volume of people
buying soap, people buying all the basics, that sort of thing. So there's
an Amazon Death Star model on one side. On the other
side is like the Arm the Rebels Shopify model, where
they're not trying to be the one store themselves. They're not trying to, you know,
replace everything you've ever done. Instead, they're trying to
do, basically, they're just trying to make it so that other stores can
be more successful and giving them the tools they need to succeed. So on
one end, Death Star, do it all yourself, end to end. On the other
end, Shopify, Arm the Rebels, help people that are already
doing these jobs, do the jobs better. Would you guys describe
yourselves more as like the Amazon of home building or the Shopify of
I think it depends on point in time. So I think
we have kind of like a three tiered master plan. It's going to take 10 years,
maybe more. The way we think about it today is it's
all like imagine there's a master plan and it's like a timeline. That
timeline is highly correlated to the right cost of capital. That's
very important to us. So our initial go to market, our
customer is really anyone that we white label a factory to, meaning
our customer is anyone we partner with to launch a factory, meaning
it's not our factory. We basically license it. So it
kind of looks more like McDonald's today, if you think about it that way. I'm
We have other verticals that we get into, which is an entire material
supplier arm. We want to supply materials to the factories, everything from
kitchen cabinets all the way to, you know, certain chemical composites for
our pure panels. Then we want to
launch our own home builder, you know, as part of phase three. So eventually,
not only are we helping small to medium sized home builders, we'll also at the same
time be competing with them. However, KUBI will be able to
reinvest into marketing a lot more than any of the top
20 national home builders today. So eventually we want to launch a brand
eventually, but it all happens in a tiered way right now. The
goal is like get as many factories out into the market as possible to
basically iterate via Kaizen, right? Process improvement the whole time.
And yeah, so like it's hard event today. Shopify eventually probably
Amazon. That's. the right way to think about it. Oleg has
always, since day one, pitched this vision and like, it's always been hard to
investors because like, it's already hard to explain our business. It's so
complicated. It's so much fit in. Exactly. That,
you know, explaining to them that eventually we want someone to, like Christian and
his family will go on, on like a sims simulator, essentially
within the confines of their local code, be able to put together a
home, pay for it. It gets sent to the local factory
automatically pay the loan and build it there. And
I can additionally add to my dream that as we have a
software that control unskilled labor and give them an exact task
what to do. When the humanoids will be ready, we can use
them because we already know what to do. We need to test them
and so on. And I think that in 10 years, when everything will be ready
Well, we're already built for it. The entire process is digital twins. So
theoretically, that's an upload to a humanoid, but humanoids are not capable yet,
obviously, to execute on what we need. So, Christian, one
of the things we've realized is kind of tough in this space. industrialized
construction, right? It can take many different forms. We're just one form
of it. And we believe in our thesis. We think the bets we're making are correct because they're
translating to cost and us executing on homes. But a lot
of folks preach automation in the space. We think automation day
one is not a correct thought just because you look at Tesla. The
reason why Tesla has been able to automate so much is because they've benefited for,
you know, almost half a half a century of Toyota's production
system and constant improvements around, you know, debundling
from skilled labor, making humans more efficient, etc. Construction never
had their Toyota production system phase yet. So how can you automate? You
might be going in the wrong direction. There are certain things that you don't even know what you're automating. So
we're big believers in being able to make humans more efficient first before
we automate. I think out of our 15 stations, only two are semi-automated at
this point. with eventual thought process that eventually each
This is actually a really good tie-in. So we talked about people and who is
building the homes and who are you selling to and that sort of thing. I think it's
now good. Let's move over to process. So maybe
to set off this section, can you talk about the
diversity of homes that you'll be able to build just like right away? Like,
are you starting, every home is exactly the same, we're just
going to copy and paste it a million times, or are you already introducing that
variability into like the actual final homes that are being output from your
It's day one, and that's a very important principle. Lack
of customization in the space has been lack of adoption. And
maybe you can talk through the base kit of parts and then the permutations.
The technology, for sure, have some restrictions. It's not, you
know, have some variety of design like it's ordered
standard construction. But at the same time, we have
less, you know, restriction with a modular construction
because we have a panelized system. We're producing panels,
part of the frame, it's like columns, it's like electric
stuff, it's something like a kit of parts. And
using them, we can do a different variety of design. Plus we
have three external finishes, two internal finishes.
And based on that, we have also a lot of designs that we can use. Based
on the mythology, we have a grid, 10 feet on 10 feet.
And based on that, the plants can be different, external plants, internal
plants also can be absolutely different. That's why right now we have a software
where our engineers very fast, or architectural
guys, very fast do the design of the house,
push the button, and the system automatically recalculate
the exact price because we exactly know how much
kilo parts and what kilo parts we use, how much, many hours we
need to assemble and to produce it. And, to
choose different type of finishes, like in a game, we
also can change the view of design and so on. After that,
push the button and the system in Unreal Engine automatically generate
rendering, plans, video, instruction how you can
It's so, um, like mind blowing sort of that you'd
be able to do that. Like, can you talk about just basically the, the
one step deeper of like, what is doing that generation and
what to do is doing that, like work planning or whatever. Like maybe, maybe
let's just focus on the work plan piece of it. Like how, like
how, how, how do you design a system that knows how to build
a home and then knows that this step has to go before that step and knows that
Well, I can start, and Alex will finish. You know that to
solve very complicated problem, you can divide
it on numbers of very simple problem. And
when you solve each simple problems, you can solve the
big problem. We do the same in the construction. We,
all of the process of the construction, we share on
very simple operation. a repeatable simple
operation. And with unskilled labor, we solve
each operation step by step. And the guys even
don't know what they will do tomorrow, because they know what
they need to do now. And the software orchestrate it
Does that mean that you have to, at the base level, like
when you're, when you're designing this and you have your engineers working in your R&D center,
you have to define a set of like primitives, basically, like
plug thing into other thing or like screw in, screw. Okay.
All the instruction and so on, and we put them into the software and orchestrate,
orchestrate them based on that. That's why, and the,
the beauty of all, maybe it's not the beauty of this stuff. If
we will change something in this scenario, kid of parts, at
the same time, we need to change the software, machines, and
the process. And that's why it's so complicated when you
I think I can actually explain it even simpler. So think of
our process, meaning from raw input to
finished goods to assembly as a multivariate equation. It's
multivariate because there's different raw inputs, different
finished inputs, different finished goods, what you need to do with
them, how you package it, and who does it, and then onsite, right? So
when you have a baseline, that baseline has say hundreds of
iterations of combinations, right? Of steps. It's all about
just orchestrating the steps. And the hard part is,
ah, the hard part, let me explain the hard part. The hard part is knowing when
to push and pull basically, because it's not, again, you're not building one
home. There's a person in the factory who everyone
gets a phone it says go to station 26a do this
task that person is not always only doing that task that
person is constantly being distributed across different tasks that's
the hard part of like knowing when to pull and push for just-in-time manufacturing here
so it's like the baseline software is distributing process
based on set parameters of raw inputs. What
do you mean by pull and push? At any given point, right, there's different stages
to a home. It's not like you're producing the entire home in one inning. You're
basically producing for the 20 different homes happening around
the factory, you're producing a different stage for each of those homes. The
push and pull being just-in-time manufacturing, essentially, but
Yeah, I can explain to you. For example, we need to use this pan to
do the stage number one, and we need to use
these airfoils for the stage number two, and this
one for the stage number three. The system have,
on the warehouse near the construction site, these two things.
They are doing like that. When the guys taking this pan
and begin to assemble it, the system give task to the
factory that they need to produce this one and deliver it.
And that's why this is a non-stop pooling system. And
the system needs to test and pool the necessary kit of parts to
assemble on the construction site, plus what they need
Part of the mobile microfactory isn't just because of the first
principles, let's close the feedback loop between off-site process
from some gigafactory and on-site. It's also economical in
the sense that we don't need to store, you know, tons of materials
on site that you have to pre-buy, right? Those are massive fixed costs, or
I guess variable costs, but up front. We don't have fixed costs like
rent, because otherwise we would have needed to rent an Amazon warehouse that's, you
know, several million dollars a year as a fixed cost. We rent a parking lot that's
less than 1% of the P&L of the factory. So it's things like
that that are economical for a mobile microfactory, not
From a first principles perspective, I feel like the pro
of just-in-time is obviously lowering the
capital burden. You don't have to have as much stuff in inventory You
can just pull things in when you need them, and then they're immediately out in the factory. And the
amount of time that they spend in the system is relatively low from you buy them
to they actually are deployed. But the trade-off
for that, in my mind, is variability or risk
of not having those original inputs to do. In
theory, you would buy them exactly the day that they're going to be put into the machine, and
then they get sent out the next day. But all of a sudden,
there's a shipping delay of three days, and then the whole thing sort of
breaks down. Are there ways that you're solving for the variability problem
Yeah, it's called Kanban. You know, the just-in-time, it's
only one of 14 principles of lean manufacturing. We
use all 14 in our approach. And one
of the principles and other principles is to use Kanban. Kanban,
this is a minimum level of materials that you need to store.
That and this minimum level is determined by the process itself.
For example, if your supplier need to have one month
just to deliver to you, you know, all of these materials. And
you will use, you know, this amount in one month. You need to
have in the warehouse two months material. And
that's why all of these levels is controlled. And we have final numbers of
these materials. that control on the factory. We have
a special shelving for that and so on with Kanban card.
I'm right now. Christian, while Oleg is walking the other layer to
this, remember I told you the second big bet is around familiarity? The
reason why familiarity matters in this case is none of our supply chain
is proprietary. Imagine that day we didn't get
cheaper sheetrock from China. We go to Home Depot, not a problem. So
the material selection is very important here. We need it to be locally available on
any market we launch. Very, very important. Part of that is because
First of all, this is a design center where
the mechanical engineering is seen. This
is the technological guys who is doing the software for CNC machines.
And this is a manufacturing where we produce
machines and kit of parts. And I will show it to you how the machines looks
like. For example, this is a robot for screw pile foundation who
produces screw piles. This is, you know, storage
for the aluminum composite. This is, for example, the storage that
we also produce to use light beads. Or,
for example, This is also the
storage for the gas. And in this storage, you can
see this is a Kanban card. In this Kanban card, this
is the minimum amount that you need to use and the order.
And this minimum order is controlled by the quality of
the suppliers that can supply for us the gas. or something like
that. And this is also to control. That's why we're producing not
only machines, we need to produce also such kind
of stuff like that, with the Kanban cards, with everything,
and so on. That's why the system itself, it's not
only the machines, It's also the shelving, it's
tooling, it's how to take it, how to deliver it,
how to control it. And only producing that, you
How much? So I imagine that there's one part of
this that's like, you design the factory to be the platonic ideal
of what the factory could be, right? Like you have, you have all of your, for
example, just very specifically, you have your Kanban quantities that are defined based
on some formula, like lead type of part or
to, you know, how much we have to buy, whatever it is. But then
I imagine there's another piece of this is that you actually go build some homes in the real
world. And once you go build some homes in the real world, you realize that
your factory is not the platonic ideal of a factory, that there is something out
there that causes inefficiencies or causes weird variable changes
or whatever. How do you measure that? And then have you
already done that? Have you already found some stuff that is not ideal
So all the time we're spending like thousands
of hours in a machine. And then in real world, you
start hiring unskilled labor to test it and it's just not working the way you
want it. You throw that in the trash and you restart. We've also
started building homes around their first test mobile microfactory. We're
constantly learning there. An example. uh sheetrock like
the wall behind you right it gets literally like nailed
into place on your framing then they'll plaster it
and then they'll sand it then they'll paint it twice that is
the most horrible bane to our existence because it makes the
construction site dirty it's very slow so we actually found a
solution for that we no longer will be as a finish just painting
sheetrock and We won't talk about yet what we're doing, but something very
clever. Things like that you discover in practice
took too long, too many labor hours. You still needed to bring in
skilled labor. There was mistakes, but the way the system was designed is,
and I think where a lot of, uh, industrious construction has gone wrong. They've
all assumed exactly what you're assuming. You create some panel of MEP in
it, you bring it on site, it perfectly clicks together. But the truth is
with every iteration of stage, you're getting further and further. You're
getting more into territory of, uh, uncertainty, right? Oleg accounted
for widening uncertainty in the system. That's why it's a pretty flexible and dynamic system
And Ola, you can probably cover this more than I can, but... Well, I can answer
on your question, Christian. It's also one of the principles of
lean manufacturing. It's called Kaizen. Kaizen, it's
a process of nonstop development and improvement of the process.
And that's why when we begin to do the real work and real stuff, for
sure we amend all of the shelving, all of this machine, the
process, and so on. And that's why we open our own test factory
where we test all of that stuff. And after the second, the
third, or the fourth for sure the process will be punishing
more and more and more. And this is beauty. You know that
in lean manufacturing approach, when the lean manufacturing consult
come to the manufacturing and she see a
lot of job, she feels himself good because she
can change something. When the process in the manufacturing is
so polished that you can change everything, you have no job. That's
why, for sure, all of the process that we're doing in the factory, it's
To be really specific about it, how are you capturing that sort of
efficiency data, though? Because I imagine that
this is a benefit for you guys. If you know what step
everybody's on, you're like, oh, we thought that was going to take two minutes. It turned out it took 10 minutes.
Oleg spent an entire weekend, two weekends ago, just trying
to quantify and create KPIs around stages. Part of the reason
why we removed Sheetrock is because it's an objective finish job.
Did you paint that well or not well? It's still painted, right? You can't
measure that. So that's why we have to remove all jobs that can't be quantified.
And as I explained to you that each part that we produce, we
exactly know such kind of metric, like how
much material we spend and how much it costs, how many
man hours we need to use to produce, and how many man
hours we need to assemble it. That's why when we produce
right now houses, we check all of these metrics and
we improve them. And that's why as less, Hours,
for example, to produce this stuff we need one
hour and one hour to install it. When we change
a little bit the process, right now it's half an hour plus half an
hour. That's why we improve the process and we reduce the cost. This is
one of the main metrics that we control, how many hours we spend to
Very cool. Okay. I want to shift this again from, okay, we've talked about
process, we've talked about people. Let's talk about the tech a little bit more. So I'm
curious to hear, I don't know how much of this is open
to talk about or whatever, but what are those machines? Like what are the things that you've built in the factories
that are new and different and you guys had to build yourselves because you couldn't
There is a lot of robots that do a lot of job.
For example, like we use a standard welding robots,
but we produce the tooling for them. And because
this tooling is 100% fit only for our, you know, proprietary
parts. We are producing the machines that producing the
panels. It's a sandwich panels within the same time,
meaning freezing and so on. That's why it's more complicated. But
at the same time, when we look on the factory, that
our factory, it's a bunch of
small factories, and each of them produce separate
part. For example, there is a department that produce glass paints
on the windows. And there is a lot of machines that do
that. For sure, we can separately produce
windows and can sell it. But for us, it's not a goal. For
us, the goal is to produce windows only for our own, you
know, houses or for the product. Because we need to
do it just in time. For example, the other department producing
screw pile foundation, the same stuff and so on. That's
why just for you to explain what machines we
did and what not, because it does not exist in the market, I
will be happy if all of the machine will be in the market and
we can buy. That's why we will, you know, we will reduce a lot
of our time, but it's not existence. That's why we need to design
Christian, our goal is to get from A to B in the simplest path possible.
B being, you know, 275 mobile micro factories,
A being kind of, we got to produce everything ourselves. We can get
to A to B in the simplest path possible while being cost
effective. That matters too. Some machines are out on the market, but they're too
For example, they know the structure of
the factory itself. You know, we have a panel, we have a
ship containers, all of the machines we put into the ship containers ready
to start. And we put the inflated building on
it that I showed you in our Denari, we have the same. It's
also one of our invention. But without
it, We need to compete with Amazon to open
275 factories a year. That's why it's
So how do you make the decision about, you know, I imagine, for
instance, like you're not building your own doorknobs or something in-house, but
I know, we are, well, the glass, I can explain you why. Doors,
you use only one, say, one size. And you can use the
one size of the doors in the building, that's why you can buy it and you can
have it on your warehouse. Regarding the glass, you have 10 or
15 types of the glass, of the glass things, and
you need to hire the local factories that
will produce windows for you. And
as it is a nonstop, just-in-time process, we're
not using subcontractor because when we will begin
to use the subcontractors, this guy will a hundred percent fail.
And it will not supply to use this, this windows just
in time. It's a hundred percent because they have their own problem. They
are doing their own production capacity and so on. And our conveyor
will stop. And that's why not to stop the conveyor, we
use only raw material and that one of the main principle, what
we produce and whatnot, for us, can we store it
in our warehouse or not? If we can, we will buy
To add to that, it's actually more simple than that even. So any
finishing for the house, think like, you
know, things like lighting or cabinetry
work, you know, like kitchens or appliances or like doorknobs, you said. So what
quantifies is finishes. we generally buy from the
market, but we might prep it in some capacity in
the factory, but we don't make it. Everything else, like the
foundation of a house, the walls of a house, like real structural, like
Got it. So I mean, but the things in principle that you would want to bring
in house are things that are, there's not easy
like commoditized supply chains for that are
you would want to bring it in-house if it's more custom like there's more variability in
Well, plus something like a doorknob has been so mass
produced and there's so many suppliers that it's very hard for us to, like, it's
not worth the ROI to go build a station, increase the size of our factory,
employ the folks to do it. Like, we can just buy that from China, you know,
In additional stuff, why we make a decision to produce EFON based
product where the manufacturer have big margin, for
Totally. So if it's more down to like the actual metal cost
of the doorknob, if doorknobs cost $100, you guys would definitely
The other practical reason is like warranties, right? When we buy it
from someone, we're covered by their warranty. When
there's things like windows we have to make or
non-structural wall panels, we then have to provide the warranty and
have to get certification to produce those things. So, the
Alright, I'm just going to lob a softball into the air and
you guys are going to just hit it out of the park. Why
There's different forms to industrialized construction. I
think out of the three forms that exist, there's volumetric modular, If
any of your viewers have ever stayed in, you know, maybe student
housing, maybe citizen M hotels, it's a chain of hotels across Europe, right?
Many of them in the U S one just opened up in Silicon Valley. I think volumetric
modular, the idea is you have some sort of gigafactory. It's, you know, 50 to
$200 million and it produces entire rooms offsite, like a finished
room, finished kitchen, living room, et cetera. And you end up shipping basically
volumetric boxes, shipping air. thousands of miles and
someone else has to go assemble it, stack them on top, et cetera. That's volumetric
modular. Prefab is really, there's different notions to
prefab, but that's really where we get categorized, although we're really more like traditional
construction meets prefab. But prefab, the idea is you produce
maybe wall panels that have MEP in them or some parts of
a home, maybe all parts or some parts of a home, ship them thousands of
miles, put them together on site. And then there's 3D printing, which
is like the full 180 other side of the spectrum. 3D
printing, I think, is an interesting solution that Venture has gotten incredibly
excited about. I think it's going to be a very long time before it
works. And when I say works, remember, the goal is we've got to produce literally
millions of homes in the U.S. There's, in our opinion, some
issues to 3D printing. Those issues are around, A, you
can't build bigger than the 3D printer. B, it's very
unfamiliar. It's very hard to create adoption in the States when you have so much
unfamiliar. I mean, 3D printing is just like alien compared to traditional construction.
It's not cost effective today, and mainly because it's
just 10% of the home building process. 3D
printing solves for framing. You frame a house. Everything
else, 90% of the build is still done by that missing skilled
labor. Traditionally, the interior finishes,
foundation, plumbing, MEP, et cetera. We
don't see 3D printing as the solution to solve America's
homes that are coming out of the factory. You have the system in
place. You have the Kaizen cards that you showed me. It's all sort
of there. Do you guys have a V2 that's somehow
going to make this 10 times better in the future? Or is
the main thing that you guys have to go do now just basically finance
this, build a ton of homes, prove that it works, get the debt financing thing
So part of the reason why we're somewhat unique, and you obviously spend
a lot of time in deep tech, and that happens to be at, say, 100% of
your network at this point. The reason why we're unique
in deep tech is because we've been able to arbitrage some of the technical
de-risking with Eastern Europe, where engineers are 10x less,
where Ola gets to spend a bunch of his time, where we set up manufacturing
and R&D, and we didn't need to raise hundreds of
millions of dollars to get to this point. We've done quite a lot of
this with very surprising amount of capital to the point
where we've now de-risked probably 98% of any of the technical
risk associated with the business. None of this is R&D anymore. All
of this has been tested. I mean, of course, there's constant improvement. We're
going to market with what we call the 1.2, which
is our factory associated with single family homes. Everything
going forward in the capital we are and will be raising in the future is
all around execution operational risk and constantly driving
away from venture toward debt. But yes, we've done, we've launched,
tested what we needed. Now we're actually starting to commercialize and we're starting
to sign contracts. Anything beyond this, we do have a
V2 and a V3 version of the factory, but those are tied
to different asset classes. So right now we're focused on detached
single-family homes, one-story, two-story, basement, et
cetera, but single-family detached homes. We want to
head toward multifamily eventually, and then to other
asset classes, every other asset class except industrial. the
Warehouses are big buckets of space. So where
the structural columns are to sustain the roof, they're
too far apart where our system can physically manufacture the size of
panels and stuff. So if we just stay in single family homes
alone, that is a massive, massive piece of the market. It's almost
50% of the US construction market. We can stay here for many
years. Other cool thing about our factories is because
it itself is a modular factory, each station can
be upgraded. So there's a station, you literally just take out a container and
plug in like a new window making station that's more efficient. You can upgrade
with time. So that's why v1.2, eventually the
same owner of the factory can get to v1.13 because they can
In developing of any process, of any product, there
is a KPI. It's called TRL. It's technical readiness level. It's
NASA methodology. Based on the TRL, right now we
are TRL number eight, because we are testing right
now in mass production. And our goal for the
next one or two years to open two factories, because
one of them we have, we tested TRL seven. Now we open
the TRL eight and we begin to earn money in scale. And after that,
It's our scaling at 0.9 when we must produce these
I mean, yeah, I mean, it does sound like this technical, the technical piece of
it is like very far along. I mean, I imagine you guys are getting a bunch
of folks like home builders reaching out to you saying like, hey, we want to do this or
maybe even developers, like people who have lands. Like, can you talk a little bit about
who are those customers? Who's reaching out to you guys? Like what sort of commercial traction
Yeah, so we have to go pretty slow right now. Our goal is
to move mass manufacturing to China. So we want to essentially,
we've now taken all our designs of machines. We know what our factory's blueprint
is, how to mass manufacture it. Now we can give it to someone else to mass
manufacture. So post this fundraise that we're
doing now, we're going to launch a Papa factory in China. Operations there
to basically do up to eight factories a year. And
then that will scale up to 20 factories per year, meaning all the machine
building assembly, we shove the machines into containers, package that
factory and send it anywhere in the world to be launched. However,
right now we have to still go really, really slow. So we've signed one
really big contract in the West Coast with a partner that we're
launching a factory off. We have two more in the works, also in the US,
and I think we're going to go pretty slow from that point on. But because we've
productized the factory and we've gone now, at least for a long time,
we've been quiet and now we're actually pretty public about what we're doing. We're constantly
getting inbound from folks that are like, wow, I could own this in my market.
I know there's a housing crisis. I know it's really inefficient to build. And
the gamut of folks we get reaching out, there's a range. We
get folks that wanna be partners that are like a small builder that says, hey,
if I call a bunch of friends, how much would I need to put one of these up? We get folks
that are massive general contractors in a region. We get ultra high net
worth family offices that are like, wow, now's the cyclical time in
the market to own a manufacturing business. We get PE shops that
do manufacturing industrial investments. So
it's a whole gamut of folks. But generally the folks who are most effective
and helpful for is anyone that wants to launch a factory who also has a
ton of acreage that they were going to unlock anyways. be a traditional home
building process. But yes, we're basically putting
folks in a queue right now. We want to be everywhere and we want 275 factories
That's so much volume. Once you actually have almost 300 factories
out there that are producing 200 homes a year, that's a ridiculous amount
of of scale. Here's
one thing about the Astronis business that I actually really like. Astronis
builds satellites. Each of those satellites is itself a contained project.
The success of one satellite has nothing
to do with the success of another one. This one might have 100% Utilization
it's like fully fully like up to scale and this other
one has 20% like that's not gonna have they're all gonna be 100% but you get the
point they're all independent and I think that's actually a pretty cool thing about
your product as well it's like you're building these factories this the
factory utilization of one factory has nothing to
do with the utilization of another factory I mean they're independent
They are. And just like you, you have a dashboard covering all these
different satellites and their performance. Our goal is also that a
lot of our corporate gets split between over
multiple factories, essentially, or we can oversee from our HQ
kind of the performance, which machine went offline, et cetera, across all
these factories. And Yes, it's hard to imagine 275 factories,
Totally. Yeah. You guys are building for that. It's not like you're building just one factor
or just one home. You're building for mass automation,
like factory line stuff. Um, okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about this fund
about like, you guys are fundraising right now, right? So if people are interested in, uh, being
Yeah. Most of the folks we spend time with are very technical, deep
tech investors. We're building a complicated business. A lot of folks who
spend time with, including our last investor who let her around, there's a climate tech
fund. There's a massive climate tech angle here that we rarely
talk about just because we believe economics should drive everything.
You know, sustainability should be a by-product. It should be just something
you do anyways. But climate spends a lot of time
with us, just given that construction is one of the biggest polluters out there. There's so much waste
associated with constructing, so inefficient, et cetera. We've
raised a lot less than people think we've raised, just given everything we've done. We're
now raising something a bit bigger, and it'll probably be the
last equity we ever raise, because everything going forward should be debt.
And I think you guys are pretty comfortable, especially in your business,
understanding where project financing and equipment, leasing, and
really the right cost of capital steps in. So our goal is to
do this last raise, prove this out a bit more, and then everything going
Yeah, so a lot of this is to help execute on our existing contracts.
A lot of this is to set up this mass manufacturing facility, what
we call the Papa factory, that births all
these mobile micro factories to keep producing case studies. It's
to also produce, I mean, no one gives us enough credit for a
first of a kind mobile micro factory in Eastern Europe. So we have to go launch our
own now, likely in Texas, using some of these proceeds.
So hopefully after this round, we get to
Awesome. Any sort of final words for our audience? Places
you want him to go? Things you want him to check out? Books you
For sure. I will be glad if you'll read
my book. A lot of stuff that I want to mention. We're
waiting. Everybody, the construction work will be in
There we go. Nice. Even I will be able to build a home with the
No, I appreciate it. I think our website is good. It's just