Mollie Claypool

Mollie Claypool is co-founder and chief executive of Automated Architecture (AUAR), the Bristol-registered company she set up with Gilles Retsin, now its chief technology officer, in February 2019. The pair spent more than a decade working across architecture, manufacturing and robotics before starting the business.

A factory that goes to the site

AUAR builds robotic MicroFactories that homebuilders deploy on site, with ABB as its robotics partner. Its MasterBuilder software turns drawings into production-ready output for the robots. The company says a MicroFactory can produce all the panels for a typical home in eight hours, at 20% less than component manufacturers and traditional framers, and can make about 200 homes a year. It operates in the US, Canada, the UK and the Benelux region.

The US is its first large market. Rival Holdings, a real estate developer that has also invested in AUAR, has taken two MicroFactories to build homes across the Midwest, and Claypool wrote in February 2026 that autonomous production there is underway. In June 2025 AUAR raised £5.1m led by Planet A, with Shadow Ventures and Concrete VC, and said it had worked on more than 300 homes in the previous year.

Faster software, more UK work

Claypool’s review of 2025 set out the pace of development: 150 hardware features deployed across its MicroFactories in four months, a next-generation MicroFactory that began testing in January 2026 with panels up to 6m long, and MasterBuilder producing robot-ready designs in under four hours. AUAR is also working with Waugh Thistleton Architects, Gardiner & Theobald and Edinburgh Napier University on mid-rise timber housing under an Innovate UK Smart Grant.

In December 2025 AUAR won the European final of the Urban Land Institute’s PropTech Innovation Challenge, after taking the UK and Ireland round. Claypool said the award validated the company’s view that “automation and technology can drive not just efficiency, but also sustainability and equity in homebuilding”. In March 2026 it opened a Free House Programme offering UK builders timber panels from MicroFactory test runs at no cost.

Why it matters to UK technology buyers

AUAR sells automation on terms builders can take up without capital: they use the robots and software without buying a factory. For UK housebuilders, framers and developers, that lowers the cost of trying robotics. For the wider technology market, it is an example of physical AI, software that plans and controls machines, reaching a working building site rather than a factory floor.

Claypool has turned an academic research program into a product with a paying US customer and operations in four regions. The next test is whether the MicroFactory scales as quickly as the software has.