Many people have claimed to change the way we build homes, but some MIT and Harvard University students and alumni think they might be the ones to do it.

The idea behind Difra Inc. is to use software to design building panels that are then cut quickly and cheaply by a computer-controlled laser cutter.

One of the team's founders, CEO Lynwood Walker, hails from a small town just outside New Orleans and is an undergraduate architectural design student at MIT who graduates this spring. Walker says that one of the keys to making his company’s structures innovative is that they use no nails. The benefit of having a laser cutter carve out the panels of wall, floor, and ceiling pieces is that they can be made to very fine tolerances, allowing the pieces to be force-fit together needing nothing more than glue to make a bond much stronger than nails.

Key to Difra’s difference is the software that Walker and his team are developing. That seven-person team includes CFO and MIT alumnus Morris Cox and CTO Steve Hershman, who has his master’s degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. That software will allow an architect to create any form or shape he wants for any part of a building and convert that to template files. The software will then interface with a standard CNC laser cutter to carve out the forms from recycled building-panel material already available on the market.

“We can build whatever our client desires,” Walker said. “As complexity scales our costs don’t as much because of the fact that all the parts are shipped to the laser (to be cut out).”

The initial target market for Difra is the high-end homebuilder who wants a singular, one-of-a-kind home. The cost of building a house, even using custom design, would be marketed at about 20 percent below that of a similar-size house, Walker said, and the cost of producing the panels is low enough that such a price lets Difra do its second mission—make affordable houses for developing countries or disaster-stricken areas such as Haiti.

The philanthropic mission of Difra was part of what caught the attention of Boston World Partnerships, according to that organization’s president, Mark Maloney.

“They needed space, so we arranged for a another business in Boston that has some good open carpentry workshop-type space to provide it to them rent free in exchange for their construction supervisor to learn how to supervise the construction of the panels—they want to stay cutting edge, too,” Maloney said.

Difra plans to have a demonstration project—a 600-square-foot cottage with custom Plexiglas skylight panels in its roof—ready to show off by early May, Walker said. The company so far has been able to internally fund the cost of its software development and even the building materials for the demo cottage, he said, although he declined to discuss specifics. While they are in talks with interested investors, Walker wouldn’t mind bootstrapping the company off of initial building projects.

“We have people we have been talking to who are interested in the houses already—people who are saying, ‘After your cottage, can you build me a house,’” he said.