The recipient of the 2020 CAMX Unsurpassed Innovation Award, Mighty Buildings Inc. (Oakland, Calif., U.S.) was founded in 2017 with the goal of disrupting home construction using large-format 3D printing, advanced materials and automation.

“We observed that, after massive disruption going on in other sectors, home construction in the U.S. was still using largely the same technologies and processes we have been using for decades and, in some cases, centuries,” says Sam Ruben, chief sustainability officer (CSO) and one of the company’s four co-founders. He adds that traditional home construction methods“are often labor-intensive, materially wasteful and energy-inefficient.”

This was particularly evident in California, which, as its population has grown, has faced a long-standing housing shortage and lack of affordable housing for low- to middle-income residents. In August 2020, the average price of a single-family home in California reached a record $706,900.

At the beginning of 2017, California changed its state regulations to encourage the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADU) — standalone housing units built on the same property of a house or other primary dwelling, which can be used for guest or office spaces, or as small, affordable living spaces. Seeing this new regulation as an opportunity, Mighty Buildings’ founders applied to startup accelerator Y Combinator (Mountain View, Calif., U.S.). Accepted for the Winter 2018 cohort, the newly formed Mighty Buildings company began to leverage the founders’ combined experience in 3D printing (CTO Dmitry Starodubtsev), business (CEO Slava Solonitsyn), robotics and automation (COO Alexey Dubov) and sustainability and housing policy to develop the Mighty Buildings team and technologies.

“From the beginning, our vision has been to develop a material and technology that will allow us to unlock the productivity needed in construction to address the housing affordability crisis,” Ruben says. “We developed [our] material and printing technology after recognizing the need for a new way to build, in order to address the lack of efficiency in construction that has led to a global housing crisis.”

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