- October 22, 2026
-
-
Loading
Loading
The sleek, white tower of a machine was supposed to start printing. Instead, Solvenah co-founder Carl David had to explain why it couldn’t.
During an early October tour of his company’s new facility on Busch Boulevard in Tampa, near the University of South Florida and Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, the construction entrepreneur walked visitors through the promise of robotic homebuilding — using automated machines, equipped with industrial robotic arms and programmed with artificial intelligence, to 3D-print the concrete, structural walls of a new home.
A group of business leaders, contractors and builders gathered in the warehouse that day, courtesy of an event put on by the Urban Land Institute Tampa Bay.
The goal? See Solvenah's sole 3D printing machine in action — a sci-fi like glimpse into the promise — and potential peril — of mixing advanced technology with a legacy industry like homebuilding.
But a test print the previous day at Solvenah had caused a concrete clog in the equipment, bringing the Oct. 1 ULI demonstration to a halt. The fast-settling material left David and his co-founder, Daniel Hechavarria, only a few minutes to clear it before it hardened.
For a business trying to make construction more predictable, the malfunction offered a useful lesson: “If you’re going to use a production facility, you can’t have that little room for error,” says David, 29.
That mix of ambition and candor runs through the founders’ plans for Solvenah, a construction company formerly called BIA Robotics. It was founded in April and specializes in concrete printing, modular fabrication and using AI to build housing and infrastructure.
The company is using its large-scale concrete printer — a Build Additive Atlas 3DCP system that prints a 12-foot-by-10-foot wall in approximately 90 minutes using certified calcium sulfoaluminate mortar — to tackle an essential modern-day question: Can homebuilding become a repeatable manufacturing process, reliant on machines instead of manual labor to build homes faster and with fewer errors for fewer dollars?
The leaders behind Solvenah say they’re already proving it’s possible.
In July, the company successfully 3D-printed the 12 panel walls that make up a roughly 1,300-square-foot home under construction in St. Petersburg’s Childs Park neighborhood. Solvenah's longer-term vision stretches to factories full of machines producing wall panels for projects beyond Florida’s borders, growing its capacity to one day build mixed-use communities, David says.
“The whole purpose of why we're doing this is, in our opinion, we believe that the labor issue in construction is going to become an issue — and some people could argue it already is an issue, but we think it's going to progress,” David says. “And, in our opinion, we have to kind of systemize or use some type of automation and manufacturing and design component to kind of offset those risks, and that's the whole reason why we're incorporating machine 3D printing. We don't think we need to be the end all be all, but this is the first iteration.”
David traces the venture’s beginnings to his undergraduate years at the University of South Florida, shortly before the pandemic brought classes to halt.
While taking an intellectual property class, he encountered examples of apartments being 3D-printed in China. A business plan development class gave him a place to explore the idea before students’ left for spring break. The pandemic made sure they never came back, David says.
“For some reason, that idea of using 3D printing really stuck with me and even though our classes didn’t really explore it I just went full force,” David says.
He got a job at homebuilding giant Lennar after USF and saw more opportunity. Soon, concerns about the construction industry’s dwindling workforce and rising prices became central to Solvenah's strategy: Use machinery and standardized processes to reduce dependency on an increasingly difficult to replenish labor pool.
The issue extends beyond Solvenah. The Associated Builders and Contractors trade released a study at the start of the year that predicted the U.S. construction industry would need to attract roughly 349,000 more workers by the end of 2026 to keep up with demand. Retirements accounted for a majority of that projected need, the study says.
David met his co-founder, Hechavarria, on a build-to-rent project in Venice, Sarasota County, where Hechavarria was a subcontractor. The two got along and began developing the venture together, he says.
The new technology promises lower construction costs, a faster schedule and a structurally stronger wall than conventional framing, the young entrepreneurs say.
David says they have financed the business themselves rather than relying on venture capital. So far, the duo has invested about $500,000 in the company, he says. Strategic partners supply additional expertise, while subcontractors handle specialized construction work.
“Almost everyone in this space is venture backed. We are not, and we don’t want to be,” says Hechavarria, 35. “All of our partners right now are nonprofits and in the future we hope we’ll be able to create our own nonprofit. It’s all about keeping our eye on our goal, which is to make your price per square footage cheaper.”
The St. Petersburg project is an early proving ground.
Developed with nonprofit Bright Community Trust, the home at 4216 14th Ave. S. is part of the city’s Affordable Lot Disposition Program, which makes city-owned land available for affordable housing developments.
To print out the 12 panel walls needed to build the house, Solvenah bought a $324,000 concrete printing system built by Build Additive. It took three days to build the panels, each one measuring 8 feet, 6 inches high, David says. The company only needed two people to get the walls printed and in place. Traditional building companies would typically hire crews of 10 or more, he says.
It is the first home to ever use 3D-printed walls in St. Petersburg, David says, and the team had to work with city code enforcement officials as they drafted new policies and procedures for evaluating 3D-printed homes moving forward.
“We’re kind of the guinea pigs,” David says. “It’s pretty cool to be able to say we were the first.”
All of the team’s 3D printed wall sections were approved by the city, and by the Oct. 1 tour David and Hechavarria were readying for the next stages in the home’s construction, including the bond beam and roof framing. The team estimates another month and a half of work.
The printer follows a digital design broken into thin, stacked 17mm layers, and uses a large robotic arm to squeeze out a proprietary concrete mix as it builds up the wall sections. Steel reinforcement, insulation and conventional building systems remain essential parts of the process. Electricians, plumbers, roofers and other tradesmen still have work to do.
As the licensed contractor, David says his responsibility extends through the finished structure.
“We’ve got to protect the end user,” he says.
That's what makes Solvenah unique. A technology provider can quote a print but cannot hold a contractor license, carry job site liability or deliver the building. Likewise, a construction firm without the equipment adds a margin at the outsourced layer. Solvenah, its founders say, combines all the needed pieces into one entity.
For now, the duo’s business model combines manufacturing and contracting.
Solvenah controls the printing process and can either deliver a structural shell to another contractor or oversee a complete build, using subcontractors for the remaining trades. David says customers generally want the full project.
The next step is moving their production process into the new leased 3,750-square-foot warehouse at 1717 E. Busch Blvd.
Printing walls at a job site exposes the material and equipment to heat, rain and changing conditions — conditions that can affect the consistency of the mix and, in turn, the structural integrity of the finished product. And transporting the company’s expensive machinery from site to site puts the entire operation at risk should something go wrong, David says.
At the Tampa facility, the team envisions multiple production stations pumping out concrete wall panels that can be transported to construction sites.
That approach could allow wall production to proceed while a foundation cures at the construction site, saving both time and money. A more controlled environment also ensures greater consistency.
Of course, there are also problems to address, like how large to make the panels, how to transport them economically and how to prevent damage in transit. The clogged demonstration equipment underscored another priority: selecting material that gives operators more time to respond when something goes wrong.
“By no means do we have everything figured out,” David says.
The financial thesis depends on repetition. More volume could spread equipment costs across more homes, strengthen purchasing power and reduce uncertainty for developers and lenders, he says. Shorter schedules also reduce the interest and other carrying costs associated with a project.
“It’s really just being predictable,” he says. “That’s our main focus.”
In addition to David and Hechavarria’s goal of one day creating a nonprofit of their own at Solvenah, the duo also hopes to launch a workforce training program. David is working with nearby USF to create a model where engineering students can participate in capstone projects at Solvenah, and also described a prospective Montgomery, Alabama arrangement that would pair access to production space with training for students at Alabama State University.
Those plans would help address the same workforce problem that drew the team to automation in the first place.
“I’m not here to hide the knowledge,” he says. “I’ll share it.”
The company is licensed to build across 16 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and has already secured municipal approvals in four Florida jurisdictions.
Ultimately, the founders want to move beyond individual houses to mixed-use developments where residents can open coffee shops, barber shops and other neighborhood businesses, he says. But getting there will require more than a handful of successful prints. For now, the company is focused on finishing its first builds, refining its manufacturing process and demonstrating their economic model can hold across repeated projects.
The machine, David says, is only one tool in that effort.
“You solve a lot of problems with scale,” he says.
