Verustruct

Yale School of Management

Industry: Construction

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Nicholas Callegari (Yale SOM, Class of 2025)

Brief Description of Solution: Verustruct is developing a suite of robotic construction devices to deliver affordable, sustainable, and safe housing. We’re taking a different approach to traditional construction, modular housing, and current 3D printed construction solutions, utilizing patent-pending translational slip form (TSF) technology. This allows us to extrude load-bearing walls on-site with electrical harnessing, plumbing, and insulation (MEP) routed within the walls, all without utilizing large and expensive printing support structures. TSF devices, coupled with separate Verustruct robotic devices that communicate with each other, leverage machine learning, and perform other construction related tasks, such as placing trusses, lintels, and laying foundations, along with our dedicated software suite allows us to be better, faster, and cheaper than competitors on the market.

Better: What we build will be like a fortress, capable of exceeding building code specs, with superior climate resilience for fire, wind, waterproofing, freeze-thaw cycling, and snow accumulation.

Faster: We’re automating more of the process and cutting out middlemen, generating inspection reports via real-time imaging as walls are being constructed and MEP is being placed to expedite the inspection process, reduce the number of subcontractors on site, and get houses built in days, not months.

Cheaper: We’re capturing more of an inefficient value chain, automating more of the construction process, and utilizing ubiquitous, overlooked materials, such as basalt and limestone, to significantly reduce construction costs per square foot, with projections under $100 per square foot.

Funding Dollars: $2.56M ($2.44M Pre-seed round; $120k in non-dilutive funding from grants/awards)

What led you to launch this venture? Verustruct was born from two worlds I grew up straddling. On one side, I watched my father — a wall laborer for more than 30 years — come home exhausted from dangerous, physically exhausting work in the Florida heat. On the other, I spent my early career at SpaceX, building cutting-edge structures for spacecraft and helping lead the engineering effort for the first commercial spacewalk structure.

Those experiences precipitated a simple realization: we send people to space with robotics, automation, and precision engineering, yet we still build the structures people live in with the same manual, fragmented, high-risk processes my dad used decades ago. And while housing costs climb and climate threats intensify, the construction industry remains one of the least automated sectors in the world.

I started Verustruct because I believe housing is too important to be left to outdated methods. I wanted to take the same first-principles mindset I used at SpaceX and apply it to solving one of society’s most fundamental problems: how to build high-quality, climate-resilient structures quickly, affordably, and at scale.

This venture is both deeply personal and intensely technical. It’s about honoring the people who build our world, fixing a broken system, and proving that robotics can make housing not only more efficient, but more human.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? My biggest accomplishment has been assembling the world-class team and support system behind Verustruct. Bringing together passionate, mission-driven engineers, operators, advisors, and investors – people who could build anything, yet choose to build this — is what gives me absolute confidence that we can change the future of construction.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Our toughest initial challenge was aligning mission with scale in forming the entity for Verustruct. We initially leaned towards a nonprofit model, but deep analysis with Yale faculty showed that the current nonprofit model wouldn’t get homes built fast enough. Shifting to a Public Benefit Corporation gave us a structure that preserves our values while enabling venture-backed speed, a balance that’s become core to Verustruct’s identity.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? The Yale School of Management’s MBA program not only serves as the catalyst for growing and scaling Verustruct, but also helped me build out a toolkit for being a strategic yet humane business leader. Through the Program on Entrepreneurship, I gained frameworks for building mission-driven businesses, aligned with the very thesis of Tsai CITY and other Yale innovation initiatives. These resources helped me shift from designing spacecraft structures at SpaceX to founding Verustruct, where we apply robotics to the housing crisis.

At Yale SOM, I tapped into a network of seasoned faculty and alumni (like Jennifer McFadden), who helped me shape both our social mission and scalable business model. The classroom taught me how to couple mechanical innovation with capital strategies, and the ecosystem provided mentorship, tactical guidance, and credibility I needed to launch our oversubscribed $2.4 M pre-seed round.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? The most valuable class I took at Yale was the Housing & Connecticut Clinic — an immersive, cross-disciplinary course connecting architecture, policy, and the built environment. The course went beyond theory, giving every student an opportunity to work with real developers on actual project proposals that could make an impact on the local community and result in more new housing units on the market. The information and skills I learned in this course allowed me to work with the Connecticut General Assembly on housing policy, preparing briefing papers, engaging stakeholders, and ultimately testifying before the Connecticut Senate in support of SB-1364.

The biggest lesson I gained from the course was this: building technology is only half the equation — policy and context drive adoption. I learned that even the most advanced construction robotics will stall if regulatory environments, financing frameworks, and developer incentives aren’t aligned. That insight reshaped Verustruct’s strategy: we designed our technology not just for engineering excellence, but for real-world deployability. With regulatory-savvy materials, cost models understandable to developers and policymakers, and a business model aligned with public good, we’re shaping our technology and business around being an impactful housing solution at-scale.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Professor Jennifer McFadden has been foundational to Verustruct’s growth. From day one in the Founders Practicum, she gave us unfiltered, actionable feedback that sharpened our strategy and strengthened our ability to execute. As a former founder, she brings a rare blend of rigor and empathy, helping us anticipate challenges, navigate the messy parts of building, and stay grounded in what matters. She helped us make informed decisions on organizational structure and craft strategies on raising capital. In the process, she gave us insights into critical business model considerations, along with a wide array of other important information for starting a startup of this nature. Professor McFadden has been a key part of Verustruct’s origin story.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? New Haven’s startup ecosystem has been foundational to Verustruct’s early success. The City of New Haven backed us with a Letter of Support, and ClimateHaven provided the space, community, and resources that allowed us to prototype, test, and build momentum far earlier than most deep-tech startups can. The ecosystem here believes in tackling hard problems, and that belief helped Verustruct get off the ground.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Verustruct’s long-term goal is to fundamentally reshape the built environment by making resilient, low-carbon construction fast, affordable, and universally deployable. If we do our job right, housing transitions from a global crisis to a solved problem, with reliable Verustructures built around the world that communities can count on.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? The biggest lesson: your early foundation determines your trajectory. The right team, support system, and capital structure upfront make scaling far smoother than trying to fix these foundational elements later down the line.

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