Zuru co-founder and CEO Nick Mowbray is aiming to engage with customers for its Zuru Tech vertical within the next two to three years.
Zuru co-founder Nick Mowbray says it hopes to have its cut-price factory-built houses ready to talk to customers within about two to three years.
Speaking at the China Business Summit hosted in Auckland today, the entrepreneur gave an update on Zuru’s construction venture, which is part of its Zuru Tech division.
The concept for the business was formed over a decade ago, but few announcements have been made public as to how it is progressing to its aim of developing factory-style house component manufacturing on a global scale.
Originally planned for launch in 2021, first Covid and then other factors have pushed back its market launch.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time, but I would say hopefully in the next two or three years we think we can start working with customers.”
Mowbray said it was completely revolutionising the way houses were built from start to finish.
“We’re optimising everything from design, compliance, manufacturing, all the way through to assembly.
“And we’re building the world’s first factory that has a fully customised input in terms of design and a fully automated output.”
Mowbray said Zuru had invested heavily in the new venture.
While he wouldn’t confirm the specific figure, he said the company had invested more into the venture than it had into its consumer packaged goods division.
Zuru was developing full-scale test houses using its Dreamcatcher software every one to two weeks out of its Chinese test factory.
It had purchased a 10ha factory in China, which Mowbray confirmed will be the first commercial factory for the construction business.
He didn’t confirm if this is Zuru’s proposed mega-factory, which he has claimed will be the second or third biggest in the world.
That size is necessary because it will aim to produce the equivalent of a 10,000sq m house every day.
Zuru Tech has 600 hardware and software engineers working full-time on the development of its factory.
Mowbray said one of the first projects will be building 12 properties to redevelop the beachfront of Malibu destroyed by wildfires last year.
Key to the construction is Dreamcatcher, Zuru’s in-house building information modelling (BIM) software.
Acquired from an Italian architectural start-up roughly six years ago, Dreamcatcher runs on Unreal Engine 5, a highly advanced computer graphics engine.
Through the free platform, users can design buildings to meet their specifications, and as Mowbray explained, Zuru has embedded almost every building code in the world into it.
“You can drop a pin anywhere in the world, and it will work out the building codes for that location. It filters in all of the terrain data, and so as you’re building, it adjusts automatically for hills or for flat land.
“Effectively, when you’ve designed your building in Dreamcatcher, it then precisely gives instructions to the factory and creates digital twins for every single part, and it’s looking at those parts and calculating whether they have the right structural integrity as well.”
It can simulate lighting to optimise the use of natural sunlight, as well as calculate the optimal positions for mechanical, electrical, plumbing and ventilation requirements.
Pairing that software with the physical manufacturing capability has been the biggest challenge for the business.
It began with a prototype factory that could create houses at a quarter of the scale in an effort to debug software and test its performance.
Made up of 16 modules, including for rebar, windows, and walls, each module is designed and built from the ground up by Zuru.
The business then built a full-scale test factory roughly 3ha in size, which is building a full-size building using its software every one to two weeks in China.
As to why Mowbray and Zuru were so invested in China, he explained that the country has an “immense scale of skill”.
“I think China has more engineers that graduate every year than the whole of the US. There’s nowhere else in the world where you have just the sheer scale skill, particularly when it comes to manufacturing and automation and the ecosystem.
“We moved to China for manufacturing initially, but now it’s incredible to watch China really innovate in so many categories and lead so many categories around the world.”
The building technology will be targeted towards the mass-market, with Mowbray explaining they haven’t confirmed their pricing plan, but suggested it could work based on some kind of supply and demand algorithm.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.