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D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder by volume, has signed a multi-year commercial agreement with Promise Robotics to use the startup’s robotic factory capacity on more than 1,250 homes. The deal, announced October 13, makes D.R. Horton the first major U.S. builder to sign on to Promise Robotics’ Factory-as-a-Service model.

On a typical jobsite, framing crews build walls by hand, cutting studs, nailing them together and standing them up on the foundation. That labor-intensive, weather-dependent work is where builders feel labor shortages most. Promise Robotics moves much of the framing into a factory, where robots assemble wall panels from the builder’s existing plans. The panels are then trucked to the site and set in place, which is far faster than framing from scratch.

D.R. Horton closed 84,863 homes in fiscal 2025, so the around 1,250 homes planned with Promise Robotics amount to about 1.5% of a single year’s volume. To start, this looks more like a measured test than a wholesale shift in how D.R. Horton builds.

R. Horton’s recent annual combined closings across Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties. The structure of the deal matters, too. R. Horton isn’t buying robots or building a factory. It’s renting automated production capacity from a third party that owns the plants, the software and the robotics, and that says it can now replicate the model market by market, starting with a factory in Gilbert, Arizona.

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