75. Automated Architecture: using smart robots to build 100,000 homes

Founder: Mollie Claypool and Gilles Retsin
Year founded: 2019
Website: auar.io

Construction is one of the largest sectors in the world’s economy – McKinsey says around $10 trillion is spent on construction-related goods and services every year.

It’s a tricky industry to make sustainable, but cofounders Mollie Claypool and Gilles Retsin are on a mission to do so with their startup Automated Architecture (AUAR).

AUAR is building an automated construction ecosystem. It has partnered with home builders and contractors in Europe and North America to build the first distributed micro-factory network for timber housing.

AUAR offers a different vision for the built environment where automation is not centralised into large factories but empowers local ecosystems of communities, contractors, architects and developers to build better homes,

The company licences its low CapEx robotic micro-factories and tech stack to a network of existing home builders. That creates a massive revenue opportunity for these companies in delivering low-energy homes at the price of normal homes and at scale, which the Startups judges were particularly impressed with.

“AUAR offers a different vision for the built environment where automation is not centralised into large factories but empowers local ecosystems of communities, contractors, architects and developers to build better homes,” says Claypool.

AUAR’s underlying data model makes all costs and other data known upfront to their clients and manufacturing partners. The startup is the only construction technology company developing an automated, systemic, design-led and global housing construction ecosystem.

Last year held plenty of milestones for AUAR. In February, its first micro-factory for robotic timber assembly was in full production in Belgium (it hit profitability in this micro-factory after just six weeks of production). In March, the startup raised a £2.6M seed round.

Claypool is targeting 40 partners for its micro-factories by 2030, with a capacity to produce more than 100,000 energy-efficient homes and remove millions of tons of CO2 each year. We’ve no doubt that AUAR will build on its already strong foundations in 2025.