Aleksandr Gampel is co-founder of Cuby Technologies, a company building mobile microfactories that mass-manufacture single-family homes using mostly unskilled labor, aiming to solve the skilled labor shortage that is constraining housing supply in the US and other developed countries.
Background and Path to Cuby
Aleksandr immigrated from Russia to suburban Philadelphia at age eight; his father was a real estate developer in Russia, so he grew up around the built world.
He studied engineering and business at Drexel University on a full scholarship, partly because the five-year co-op program let him work full-time during college at places like a REIT, PNC’s quantitative trading team on Wall Street, and Susquehanna’s equity research group.
He disliked the intangible nature of Wall Street—buying pieces of companies he could never see or touch—and gravitated toward real estate private equity, where he worked on roughly $2–3 billion in transactions across asset classes, favoring hospitality and multifamily.
After college he joined WeWork in 2016, when it had about 1,000 employees and was valued around $23 billion; he left in early 2019 when it had grown to 13,000 people.
He joined the real estate team, which was the smallest team at WeWork because scaling physical space requires more construction and design staff, whereas leasing and site selection can be done by a smaller group.
He valued WeWork not for specific technical learnings but for the network—WeWork was the hottest company in the world at the time, and being there gave him access to investors, founders, and operators across the built environment.
He left partly because of what he calls “wrong cost of capital”—he believes venture funding is appropriate for R&D-stage work, but once a business reaches scale, debt and private equity are more efficient forms of capital.
Meeting Oleg and Forming the Partnership
While building an affordable housing development business with two mentors, Aleksandr struggled to hire enough skilled construction workers and began evaluating existing “industrialized construction” solutions—modular, prefab, 3D printing—as a potential customer.
None of the existing solutions worked for him as a developer, so he started asking venture-backed founders in his network what they were building.
A mutual friend introduced him to Oleg Krivitsky, who had already invested about 50,000 engineering hours into a construction automation concept through his existing industrial design R&D business.
Aleksandr had one Zoom call with Oleg, saw the demo, and three days later texted him saying he wanted to quit everything and build it together.
Oleg had previously run a 200-engineer industrial design firm (similar to frog design or Newlab) that did contract R&D for corporations and startups. When he hired a developer and general contractor to build his own headquarters, he experienced firsthand the chaos of traditional construction and realized his expertise in lean manufacturing (Toyota Production System) was directly applicable to housing.
Aleksandr believes Oleg chose him as a co-founder because their vectors aligned: same life philosophies, work ethic, and moral values; complementary skill sets (Oleg is deeply technical and operational, Aleksandr is the passionate front-facing seller and customer expert); and Aleksandr intimately understands the customer because he has been a developer.
The Housing Problem and Cuby’s Thesis
The core problem: the US is missing millions of construction workers needed just to build today’s housing demand, let alone close the existing supply gap. The average construction worker is 42 years old, and roughly 40% of the US construction workforce is expected to retire within 10 years, even as household formations increase.
Construction is one of the only industries where productivity has declined over the past 50 years—a construction worker today is less productive than one in the 1970s—due to a combination of labor shortages, increasing regulatory complexity, and lack of industrialization.
Cuby’s thesis is that the solution is to build more housing with fewer skilled labor hours by applying lean manufacturing principles in a factory setting.
Aleksandr distinguishes Cuby’s approach from three other venture-backed categories:
3D printing: Only automates roughly 10% of the homebuilding process (the walls/framing), doesn’t solve the cost problem (concrete is expensive, setup costs are $1.5M+ per site), and hasn’t proven cheaper than conventional construction. Aleksandr has seen roughly four dozen 3D printing companies doing essentially the same thing, which to him disqualifies it as a defensible solution.
Volumetric modular: Entire rooms or modules are built in a centralized factory and shipped to site. This works for repetitive products like hotels and student housing but fails for single-family homes because developers demand high customization, the economics of centralized gigafactories don’t work in cyclical real estate markets, and shipping finished volumetric modules is expensive and logistically impractical.
Prefab/panelization: Produces wall panels or components in a factory. Cuby does produce some components but avoids fully finished panels because inspectors can’t see behind closed walls, creating regulatory red flags.
Cuby’s Three-Pillar Model
Pillar 1 – Mobile microfactories, not centralized gigafactories: Cuby’s product is a factory, not a house. Each factory is containerized, standardized, and repeatable—like a McDonald’s franchise model. The factory is shipped to or near the construction site, eliminating the feedback loop and shipping costs of centralized production. The goal is to deploy 200+ factories over time.
Pillar 2 – Don’t change the end product: Cuby builds conventional single-family homes that look and function like any other home. The homes are assembled on-site from kit-of-parts produced in the factory, using traditional staging and inspection processes. This avoids regulatory friction and incumbent resistance.
Pillar 3 – Must be cheaper from day one: Cuby’s single KPI, displayed on every employee’s desktop wallpaper, is the output per mobile microfactory (square footage) relative to the skilled labor hours required. The company will not go to market unless it can build homes cheaper than conventional construction. The current target is to reduce labor hours from roughly 7,000 per home to approximately 2,200—a roughly 60% reduction—using four unskilled workers across two shifts over 30 days.
Operations and R&D
Cuby’s R&D is based in Eastern Europe, where Oleg had existing infrastructure from his prior business and where engineering talent costs 7–10x less than in the US while maintaining high STEM education standards.
Aleksandr and Oleg have completed roughly 350,000 engineering hours while raising what Aleksandr describes as a remarkably small amount of capital compared to peers—he wants Cuby to be the company that reaches billions in revenue with the least dollars raised.
About 50% of the factory is proprietary (custom-built machines designed to fit in containers), 50% is off-the-shelf equipment branded with Cuby’s logo, and all software—including dispatch, payroll, training, and dynamic assembly instructions built in Unreal Engine—is built in-house.
The system uses a kit-of-parts approach, meaning every home can be slightly different (like configurable products rather than identical units), and the assembly instructions dynamically update to match each specific home’s configuration.
The first commercial factory is being deployed in Las Vegas, where a development partner controls 6,000 acres of land and will both use and back the factory. Las Vegas has an estimated shortage of 86,000 housing units.
Cuby is also exploring Cyprus as a market, where a wave of tech company migration from Russia, Ukraine, and surrounding countries has created significant housing demand.
The Idiot Index and Continuous Improvement
Oleg applies what he calls the “idiot index”—removing every process, part, or step that requires skill or subjective judgment, so that unskilled workers can assemble homes by following instructions alone.
An early test house was built by welders and software engineers with no construction experience; it took 90 days instead of the target 30, but this compares favorably to the 7–12 month conventional timeline.
Subjective tasks like finishing Sheetrock (sanding, painting) are being eliminated in favor of materials like bamboo cladding that require no finishing—an example of designing the product around the constraint of unskilled labor.
Co-Founder Dynamics and Philosophy
Aleksandr believes founder dynamics are the number one reason companies fail. He and Oleg balance each other: Oleg is technical, operational, and direct to the point of bluntness; Aleksandr is passionate, customer-facing, and relationship-driven.
Both are Eastern European, which Aleksandr believes gives them a less transactional, deeper approach to relationships than is typical in US business culture.
His life philosophy is to add value to others with nothing expected in return—it always comes back around.
He optimizes his career for the people he surrounds himself around rather than salary, and he sees serendipity as a major factor in finding the right co-founder.
Funding Environment
When Cuby started roughly 3.5–5 years ago, hardtech and construction tech were not popular categories; most venture investors weren’t focused on the space.
The environment has shifted significantly—there are now 4–5x more general partners at venture firms actively investing in this category than when Cuby started.
Aleksandr welcomes higher interest rates and cost of capital because they force companies to be resourceful, scrappy, and revenue-generating from earlier stages, filtering out weaker businesses.
He believes Cuby is near an inflection point where the remaining risk is operational execution rather than technical, and that future growth can be funded through cheaper forms of capital (debt, project financing) rather than additional venture equity.
Personal Reflections
Aleksandr’s role model framework favors builders who create real, profitable businesses with minimal capital, even in unglamorous industries.
He admires Elon Musk for building multiple hard businesses, the Roblox founders for their capital-efficient growth and pivots, and MrBeast for his unconventional approach.
The hardest thing about being a founder is managing the extreme emotional volatility—going from elation to despair within a single hour—and simply staying in the game longer than anyone else.
His favorite motivational idea comes from Will Smith: “I wasn’t the most talented, but if I’m on a treadmill with someone else, I will not get off that treadmill until I die.”
