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BY Lance Lambert

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D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder by volume, has signed a multiyear 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’s 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.…