Bending Gravity To Build Houses Faster

If you have ever watched a new build drag on for months, balloon in price, and still feel like a custom prototype at the end, you already know the real problem with housing: the process does not scale. Today we sit down with Vikas Enti, CEO and co-founder of Reframe Systems, to talk about a different model for construction, one that borrows lessons from robotics, systems engineering, and manufacturing to make housing faster, cheaper, and more predictable.

Vikas helped lead major deployments at Amazon Robotics after the Kiva acquisition, and he brings that “complex systems” mindset to one of the most stubborn industries in America. We dig into why jobsite construction stays serialized and weather-dependent, and how Reframe’s low-cost modular microfactories change the equation by decoupling work from the site. He explains the idea of “bending gravity” inside the factory, how worker augmentation enables generalists to do skilled tasks, and why their robotics roadmap is designed to raise automation without the price tag of traditional industrial systems.

We also get concrete about where this matters most: infill development in existing neighborhoods, where zoning differences and approval friction can make costs spike to $300 to $400 per square foot. Vikas walks through how computational design and software-driven engineering support mass customization across municipalities, plus what they are learning from projects in Massachusetts and from wildfire rebuild work in Altadena. Finally, we talk team building, vertical integration, and what is coming next: a production-scale facility, a five-story apartment building, and an aggressive push toward higher volume.

If you care about construction technology, affordable housing, low-carbon homes, modular building, or the future of factory-built housing, this one is for you. Subscribe for more conversations with builders and technologists, share this with a friend who debates housing policy, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling microfactories.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello and welcome to What the Tech Room Boasts, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Dabenport, post resident tech journalist, and today I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Vickus Enti, CEO and co-founder at Reframe Systems. Founded by former Kiva and Amazon robotics leaders like Vicus, Reframe Systems is an awning mission to unleash low-carbon homes for all by bending the cost of construction with low-cost modular microfactories. By leveraging computational design, matrix manufacturing, flexible robotics, and worker augmentation, Vic and his team can deliver homes two to three times faster and at a 50% lower cost basis predictably. As I mentioned earlier, however, this is hardly the first go-run through the innovation ecosystem for Vic. Along with more than 11 years at Amazon Robotics, where he ultimately acted as head of systems and products, he's built a career that marries entrepreneurship with true engineering prowess, with technical degrees from both Cornell and MIT, while actively working alongside VCs and as an angel investor to support great ideas in the Boston area and beyond. It's a fantastic mission and journey through the tech ecosystem, and I can't wait to pick his brain on his path as a founder and what's on deck as Reframe Systems grows. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Vic.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Thank you so much, Paul. That was a wonderful introduction. Much appreciated and uh excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Oh, I'm very happy to have you. Um, like I said at the beginning, you're a Boston area uh resident as well, and I'm very honored to finally be speaking with some folks who are actually in my backyard. So that's one thing that's really exciting. But the other thing too is just what you're doing at Reframe System and the great story you've had to building this business. So to kick it off, I know I gave a little bit of a spiel about you and your background, but I want to

From Amazon Robotics To Housing

SPEAKER_00 1:43

hear from you. Tell us about Vic and then tell us how you got to building the business that you have today.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Absolutely. Um I mean, I've always had a passion for building ever since I was uh having a little kid. Um most of my background, I'm playing professionally, has sort of been in the world of uh uh mechanical and systems engineering. Um and uh really got good at thinking about complex systems and how do you design them, deploy them, uh, how do you improve them in operations and got to do this time and again. Uh at Amazon Robotics, I was there through an acquisition of a startup called Kiva Systems. So we got to disrupt uh a lot of fixed-line conveyor systems with mobile robots. And through that journey, I think you really got experience um how the rapid pace of deployment can actually allow a business to grow faster. I think we really learned that speed ultimately becomes the ultimate differentiator and the driver of cost. A lot of times you hear about hey, you you can either get it fast or cheap. Uh I actually believe that faster is cheaper, and I'm saying that the whole Amazon experience uh really honed that in. Um and uh towards the end of the journey, really got to um play a key role in deploying almost half a million robots around the world uh during my time um at Amazon Robotics. Uh, became a dad uh at the end of that journey. And uh that was a moment of introspection on okay, what do I do for this next uh chapter of my life? And um started asking this question on what would my twin daughters when they're teenagers, what would they be proud of when they look back and say, Oh yeah, my dad did that, that was super cool. And that became a clarifying question, it's like what should be the next thing I work on, and um built conviction that I should use all the skills I sort of built up around solving problems that have have very high social value and also a pathway for reducing carbon emissions. And uh took about a year from asking the question to landing on housing as the problem that uh allows uh open the aperture for being able to both solve for carbon emissions and building homes that people need. Um, build conviction, uh founder problem fit there as I started thinking about like what needs to be true to fundamentally change the the cost curve and and uh just predictability of the construction process. Uh build conviction on uh developing low-cost microfactories as a pathway for decoupling the construction process and uh one thing led to the other, and here we are. I mean, we've been at it for three and a half years now. Uh our whole mission of a reframe is to make housing abundant and resilient. Uh, we just built our tenth home. Uh homes nine and ten were actually built in uh Altadina in California as part of the wildfire rebuild. Um and um a year from now we're gonna build almost a hundred homes out there. So we're in a pretty good clip uh continue to drive the scale. Uh and we've learned uh many a lesson in how to be continue streamlining our process, streamlining the business. Uh so happy to dive into any of those things.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

I love it. I'm gonna pull back on a few things that you mentioned there. First off, that was an amazing grounding. And the word that I heard a few times that I really just want to draw an extra line under is conviction, too. So again, you have the skill set, you have the expertise, you've honed a career as somebody who is very skilled at tackling very technologically complex situations and problems. But conviction is what I kept on coming back to. And again, as you become a parent, your perspective changed a little bit. You want to make sure that you're leaving a legacy behind, but also you want to make sure you're leaving a world behind that is better than at least at if not better, better than it could be if you weren't applying your skills and what you've learned working in the robotics field at Amazon, building these systems for the future generations. So I love that that kind of motivated you to explore reframe systems. Again, I love too that you guys are tackling very pressing issues too, and at speed. You hit the nail on the head when you were saying that speed usually is not what you hear. Faster is cheaper, is something that is not the paradigm that always comes through. So I'd love to learn more about specifically how these microfactories operate. Like what is the vision? What does it look like today, and what is it going to grow into um at scale as you and also even the timeline. I think that's something that's very interesting in everything that you've talked about here, too. It is really about speed and making sure you can resolve things, ASAP. So

Why Construction Stays Slow

SPEAKER_00 6:08

take it away. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Absolutely. I think it'll probably help uh to sort of talk through like what is the current status quo for construction, right? Like it takes uh from the moment you have a permit, it takes almost 25 different subcontractors to come in to build the smallest of homes, right? So it'll take you anywhere from 90 to 300 plus days to 500 plus days, depending on the size of the structure. Uh and it's a very deficient process where you're having it's highly serialized, it's highly weather dependent, it's highly dependent on when inspectors show up to inspect things. And everything ends up becoming a prototype once it's all said and done. And so when we observe that system, we sort of ask our question on like what needs to be true uh for us to be able to bend gravity. And what I mean by that is why do we have to build the floor before we can build the walls, before we can build the ceiling? Right? The whole system is highly serialized because gravity really dictates the order in which you can do things on the job side. Realize actually if you decouple from the job side, you can actually start building things in different orders, right? So in our factory, we actually get to, in fact, we actually build our ceilings and walls before we build our floors. And I'll talk more about what we do there. But but it started raising the question on if you decouple from the job side, what else can be true that allows you to get significant efficiencies? And it became very clear that you get to catalyze the process to a level that's just not possible on a job side, to the fact that you can recover significant schedule savings. And we've seen this proof point, right? I think factory built housing's existed since the 60s, and they've all consistently demonstrated it can be significantly faster. The place that we saw a gap with the existing factory-built housing industry was that you didn't always show cost savings, and you also there's no demonstrated proof point of scale. And I think what we found is that factories that exist for building homes today take anywhere from 300 to half a million square feet of space, uh cost anywhere from $30 to $50 million to deploy, and sometimes take two to three years to actually get set up. So you just have a very high capital need, high space needs, uh, to the point that these factories are located in the middle of nowhere, and then you try to really get a labor arbitrage. And you push all the fixed costs onto the cost of the product. So the end of the day, the customer gets to see a product that's faster, but not necessarily one that actually moved the needle on their cluster. So we start asking the question on what needs to be true to rethink the factory so that you actually get to reliably reduce the fixed cost overhead, um, significant intro labor efficiency so it can actually drive both speed

Microfactories And Bending Gravity

SPEAKER_01 8:46

savings and cost savings. And that's where we took our approach of microfactories. We said, like, could you build a factory that was 10 times smaller that still had the same throughput? And so we've achieved that with our approach. Happy to elaborate on that. But then we also asked other questions what does it take to reduce the overall fixed cost? So our factories cost less than five million dollars, we can deploy them in less than 100 days. Borrowing a lot of concepts that we got to validate uh during our time at Amazon, but also a lot of first principles thinking on what has to be true uh to really drive the lead time down. And then we've applied some significant technology both in how do you augment our existing workers so we can actually have generalist workers, high school co-ops, sort of carpenters all being able to do highly skilled tasks on wiring, plumbing, HVAC in addition to doing structural work. Um and we've also applied and developed our own robotic system that today is automating about 20% of the work. It's a roadmap to automate up to 80 to 90% of the work over time, uh, at a fraction of the cost of other robotic systems. So this combination of automation and worker augmentation is sort of where we've made a bet um with how we can drive uh uh labor efficiencies in our factories, but they also having a really low-cost factory. Our whole goal is how do you deploy these across the country, have it be closer to customers. Uh as a reference point, our factories are no larger than the garden center at a home depot. Um, there's about 2,000 Home Depots across the country. Our goal is to have at least 400 to 600 of these microfactories around the country, so we can achieve our goal of building a million homes by 2040.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Million homes by 2040. That is incredible. And you guys are very clearly on your way. And one thing I just want to call out too here is that what you just described, too, in the automation and in the augmentation and in the ability to bend gravity, like you were saying, too, you're tackling technological uncertainty. I gotta give the call out to kind of just that like bare minimum threshold that you have to meet for the RED tax credit programs in the US, which is both spread and butter. You can't just be reinventing the wheel. Even when you're talking about um the robotic systems that you helped develop at Amazon, what you're doing today for reframing when you're building these micro factories, it isn't necessarily taking that and then just applying it here. You're augmenting it, you're using it in a new way, you're driving more efficiencies. To your point about, I forget the total number, but I think you would set it with something like it takes 300 days to build a factory today that would produce these kinds of homes in the like previous status quo. And what you guys are tackling again is creating something that can scale because it's no larger than the garden center, but you're using technology that makes the workforce more efficient, bends gravity, like we're talking, make sure that you're not limited by the restrictions of a site, for instance, but you're actually able to just get the thing done and do it at speed. And again, accomplish those cost savings so you're not passing it on to the customer. I know I just went in a bunch of different directions now, but I did want to kind of just summarize that again, you're tackling technological uncertainty. This isn't something that is done day-to-day. So, for folks listening in our audience too, this is exactly the example of what the IRS is looking for. For instance, when you need to provide the qualifying data for the RD tax credits to prove that you're actually meeting that threshold, you're doing systematic investigation. You're not just taking something off the shelf and applying it in a way that's been applied before. Even if you are taking tools off the shelf, you're making sure that they are tackling something net new, even if it ultimately does serve a customer in the same market or threshold that you needed to before, you're doing it in a new way and you're doing it in a way that delivers fresh value. So just need to kind of give you guys kudos there. And again, that shout out to the listener audience that what Vic just described here is exactly the kind of storytelling that also the IRS wants to see when you're claiming RD tax credits. So getting away from the money of it all. I don't want to be too cynical and only talk about the funding strategy, but I do kind of want to hear about some of the projects that you're working on today and also how that technology that you're developing has made all this a reality. I know the Altadena one is one that comes to mind immediately just because we all remember the wildfires. I vividly remember, I was just thinking about the Atlantic art uh edition that I got that was all the pictures from all of that. And I was thinking, oh my God, I just it didn't look like Earth as I knew it, let alone California as I know it. I also know I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I'm a Bostonian. Um I know that our own mayor was even just talking about the cost of construction and housing locally and how she's looking at tax credits right now to maybe try to accelerate some of that. I'm based here out in Brighton. I've actually seen a lot of modular construction happening recently. I'm also a development nerd, so I've been following all the local on this kind of urban development, how the BRA is now the Boston Housing and Development Association and how all of that has evolved over the past few years. So for non-wonks like me, tell me a little bit more about the challenges, whether it's locally here in Boston or if it's out in Altadena, or just generally when we're talking about building new houses and how the technology you've developed is really honing in on that with some examples.

Zoning Reform And Infill Economics

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Absolutely. So if you think about there's about 1.5 million housing units built in the US every year. A big chunk of them are uh single-family homes built out in farmland, right? So when you think about production home builders like the Linars and Tool Brothers and Dear Horton, they've sort of clicked in this share of the market, which is right, go find new farmland that you can convert and you go build homes there. And I think that strategy has worked, I'd say, for the last 40 years as people have sort of moved away from urban centers to suburban markets. We're seeing a reversal now. If you sort of think about the demographic shift that's taking place, we're finding that both baby boomers who are downscaling want to move back to neighborhoods that have restaurants and services, healthcare nearby. And uh the Zoomer, the Zoomers are also looking to have more physical connectivity and be located to existing neighborhoods. And there's not obviously enough land available in these markets, but we're finding significant zoning reform that's taking place, right? Be it out in Massachusetts, out in California, all around the country, where cities have realized that the only way they get to continue growing is by allowing developers to build more housing in existing neighborhoods. So now you can build triple deckers by writing single family lots, you can build multifamily by right. And what we find is that this market is extremely inefficient. Production builders around the country can build for $100 a square foot. But once you start having to build in these infilled markets, your cost of construction starts jumping to $300 to $400 a square foot. And that's what we see in Massachusetts in the LA market, the numbers twice that. And this is where we found that this is actually a great place for technology to move the needle significantly. Where like our software system, maybe we have built a whole bunch of software on the design side, but how do you quickly mass customize a building so that if I had a triple decker that was designed for Somerville, Massachusetts, and now I need to deploy that in Brighton, how does the software actually reconcile what are the zoning differences, cycle differences to then be able to say we need to make a slight change on certain uh window ratios uh so we can still be compliant with zoning? We're trying to make the entire design engineering process a software process so we can actually be significantly faster, but also get to this end state world where we can build on any lot, any community, any type of home with them from the same factory for the same marginal cost, right? So, how do you get to this world of mass customization? That's what we've truly unlocked. So in these mispriced markets, because we are vertically integrated, right? We come in as a single designer, manufacturer, builder. We work with developers as our primary customers. We're able to offer a much better value proposition where not only can we start building these homes in as little as 100 days, uh, we just built uh two triple deckers in Somerville for about 180 days, roughly. The second was about 150 days in time. Uh we're gonna be building these 12 single-family homes in Devons. Our 12th home, we're projecting like 55 days to go from foundation to completion. And we're finding uh that one, the the the speed is helping the overall investment return look extremely attractive for developers. But in addition to the speed, like we're currently right, our projects are pricing roughly 20% below the market uh in terms of the cost that we're seeing here because of the advantage we have in the vertical compression of the value chain, all the technology we're deploying to um uh make our uh workforce significantly more efficient. Uh and also all the work we do to reduce material waste, but then we're just finding a lot of headroom there. And that's allowing us to be a very uh compelling value add provider for development partners. Um and um that's the path in how we're unlocking projects and we're able to build both projects for market trade and affordable housing. Um in Massachusetts and New England mostly today, and we're running pilot projects out in LA, uh, where we're targeting homeowners or trying to rebuild. And uh the homeowners are rebuilding with us in Altadina today. Uh we installed yeah, April 20th is when we set their bungalow in ADU. They should be getting their keys in about three months in total for that process. It's also significantly faster. Um I think we're having real-proof points there on speed, and all of them are paying um a much better price point uh on their projects compared to where the market's at.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

That is incredible. Even going back to one of your earlier comments, even when you're talking about like building a triple decker in Brighton versus Somerville, I know it's a little unique in Massachusetts, but I think it's seen other places too that just municipality to municipality, the rules are so different. But if you think they're all lumped into one thing. I live right on the line in Brookline in Brighton right now, actually. And there is a lot that straddles both sides of town. There's a single family development on the front side of the lot, the Brookline side. It's a 15, I think, unit development that's attached to it on the Boston side. But they had to go through hoops in years of planning where I don't even know how the developer is getting any money out of this with how much time they've wasted and how much sunk costs into just getting the neighbors to show up to the planning board meetings and things like that and actually listen to what they have to say. So that point you made about making the design and even the approval process, more of a software-driven thing. Yes. Like I just see the inefficiencies that pile up even in just getting the approvals. But then you guys take it a step further, you get the design locked in, and then it actually comes to like building the damn thing. You're actually getting it made at a timely, in a timely fashion that the customer can get excited about, to be honest. Yes, they're gonna see their investment sooner. It's gonna be more cost effective because it's done at that speed, but they don't have to sit and wait and then expect the worst. I think it's a lot more of a controlled environment, too, which is, I think, something you've said without saying it in a lot of what we've been discussing here.

Building A Hybrid Construction Team

SPEAKER_00 19:31

So now going specifically to the business of it all too, reframe, tell us a bit about your team. Tell us a bit about the other uh members of your founding organization who you brought in to help make this a reality.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yeah, we we have the only team in the world today where carpenters, roboticists, architects, developers are all having us together. Uh, we truly see this as a systems problem. And uh, we built a team that can sort of think about this not as an architecture problem or a manufacturing problem, but basically it's a home building problem. Part of me, right, make homes magically appear overnight and let's keep filling the layers on ends there. So I've been very fortunate with my co-founders, so Aaron and Felipe, uh, both bring significant experience from uh Amazon Robotics. That's where we work together. Yeah. Uh, and we get good coverage with them across really deep technical know-how on the robotic side from Felipe. And then Aaron brings a really unique mix of uh technology and operations background from Amazon. And then very quickly we sort of expanded to get coverage on our executive team where um we have leaders like Justin Hirsch, who a veteran from the trade show industry, right? So he was in the business of building uh temporary structures, right, in less than five days, uh uh leverage manufacturing technologies, and we're applying a lot of those lessons into how do you think about bringing those efficiencies into our construction process. Um we've had uh leaders like Stacey uh who uh ran really large construction projects at Consigli and Turner, and now she's heading North Friday operations team. Uh, and we've got a pretty deep technical bench um that sort of goes into. I think overall we've been very deliberate making sure we can find leaders who um are well respected in the construction industry or a construction adjacent industry. So that way we don't end up being all outsiders who are gonna make uh mistakes that people have only learned lessons from. Uh our goal is to make new mistakes and make sure we can learn from those quickly and keep moving the process forward. Uh, we definitely don't want to make amateur mistakes that have only been learned uh really well. So we balance the team up pretty nicely, though.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

No, absolutely. You want to make those new mistakes. And I love even too that you said yes, you're focusing on making sure it's folks who are well respected in the construction space, but it's not just an architecture or a manufacturing or construction problem. So you're bringing people in those adjacent fields into the fold, which I think, again, for the listeners, definitely the strategy to follow. It might sound like that's an obvious route to take, but some folks will go with like, okay, I don't want to say the devil I know, but a friend of mine who I'm comfortable being honest with, where they might not have that expertise in an adjacent or complementary field. You want to make sure you're looking with clear vision, like you said, the holistic skill set that you need to solve the problem at hand. And the problem, again, it's not architecture, it's not aesthetics, it is manufacturing in terms of actually getting the thing done and constructing the thing, but it's a holistic problem that is much bigger than all of it. It's housing. It's making sure that housing can happen effectively, quickly, cost-effectively. So get those folks in those adjacent complementary uh industries and skill sets on your team early so that you can have all the resources you need to have that credibility in the markets that you're going into, but also to that perspective, just outside of the four walls of your area of expertise. So I think that's amazing. I know we've talked a lot, Vic, about everything that you guys are doing and a little bit of the roadmap ahead, but what's some stuff over the next like six months to a year that we can look forward to for folks who want to start from a win-loo frame?

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Absolutely.

What Reframe Ships Next

SPEAKER_01 23:08

I mean, we're super excited. So we're um we're currently operational in a prototype microfactory here in Andover, Massachusetts. Uh, we'll actually be launching our first production scale facility uh later this year. Uh so excited to ramp up into that. Uh, it'll still be in Massachusetts. We'll disclose the location uh once we start done with the leasework. So we're super excited to show that our process skills demonstrate how we can launch the building in 100 days and continue building more homes. Uh, we also have our first five-story apartment building coming up in Roxbury. Um, so we're excited to get that off the ground and then continue. Like I said, um, we'd love to have a hundred homes in the ground by this time next year. Uh so we're working pretty diligently against that backlog that we've already signed on, uh, but sort of making progress towards how do we uh continue building that pipeline where we can build thousands of homes over the next couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

I I love it. Well, Vic, I feel very fortunate to be again your neighbor here in the Boston area. And I can't wait to see all these homes and the new construction come live here, but also the impact you're going to be making globally. So this is incredible. I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What the Tech. Again, this is exactly the kind of innovation that's pushing the boundaries and the model that I want our listeners and the view in the audience to make sure that they are adhering to. Um, again, make sure that you're tackling real problems, that you're thinking big picture, you're getting the right team on your side, but also that you have conviction. I think conviction at the core of everything you do is incredible. And you definitely demonstrate that, Vic. So thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, thank you so much, Paul. This is wonderful.