Mighty Buildings Makes Stylish, 3D-Printed Prefabs Starting at $99K

Amidst the pandemic-fueled housing boom, newly launched company Mighty Buildings offers an attractive solution to the nation’s lumber and labor shortages: 3D-printed homes that can be built with 95% fewer labor hours at twice the speed of conventional construction.

Operating out of an Oakland warehouse, the Y Combinator–backed startup constructs prefab homes with their Big-G Printer, a 20-foot-tall 3D printer that, at speeds of 120 millimeters per second, can print a 350-square-foot studio in less than 24 hours. The homes are made of Light Stone, a thermoset composite material that hardens when exposed to UV light.

Instead of 3D printing sections of each home for on-site assembly, the machine maximizes cost savings by printing the home’s entire structural shell—thus automating the building process by up to 80% with cost savings of 20% to 30% compared to traditional prefab methods.

"Because we’re building homes for people to live in, we’ve been very deliberate in carrying out our vision to make housing better. This isn’t software that can be debugged on the fly," says Slava Solonitsyn, Mighty Building’s CEO and co-founder. "We’re now ready to scale our production with full confidence in our certifications and code compliance of both our material and technology."