Aleks Gampel is COO and Co-founder at Cuby, a company rethinking how homes are built in the middle of a nationwide housing crisis. The cost of housing has soared while construction productivity has barely budged in decades, and today’s homes are still built through slow, wasteful, and carbon-intensive processes that aren’t designed for escalating climate risks. Instead of shipping prefab boxes across the country, Cuby asks what it would look like if housing finally had its assembly line moment—and the factory moved to where homes are needed. Their mobile microfactories are inflatable, rapidly deployable facilities that manufacture standardized home components on or near the job site using mostly unskilled labor, then assemble houses in a predictable, repeatable way. In this conversation, Aleks unpacks the roots of the housing shortage, why past modular attempts fell short, and how Cuby’s model could change what’s possible for housing affordability, waste reduction, and resilience.

Episode recorded on Nov 20, 2025 (Published on Dec 16, 2025)

In this episode, we cover: 

• [4:40] Causes for the housing crisis today  
• [8:17] Emissions associated with housing and how Cuby differs
• [12:54] An overview of  industrialized construction 
• [16:43] Main challenges with industrialized construction
• [19:25] Cuby’s antithesis to centralized gigafactories in construction
• [27:08] How Cuby’s inflatable mobile microfactory works
• [30:17] Cuby’s European headquarters and China facility 
• [31:57] Cuby’s single-family home design 
• [33:30] The company’s business model
• [37:52] Why Cuby isn’t displacing jobs 
• [38:55] The company’s funding to date 
• [40:15] What’s next for Cuby

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant