Promise Robotics signs a multi-year deal with D.R. Horton covering 1,250 homes

Promise Robotics said on October 13, 2026, that it has signed a multi-year commercial agreement with D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in the United States by volume, under which the builder will use the company’s robotic production service “to support the production of 1,250+ homes”. The announcement, datelined Phoenix and posted on the Promise Robotics newsroom and on PR Newswire the same morning, does not give the value of the deal, its length, where the homes will be built or which parts of them the robots will make. D.R. Horton had not published its own release on the agreement when we checked its investor relations site on October 15. Onticpost has no hardware from either company, so nothing below is a test result of ours.

Takeaway points

• Promise Robotics announced on October 13, 2026, a multi-year agreement under which D.R. Horton will use its Factory-as-a-Service production platform for “1,250+ homes”.
• That figure is about 1.5 percent of the 84,655 homes D.R. Horton closed in the twelve months to June 30, 2026, and it is spread over a contract whose length was not given.
• Neither company has published the money involved, the components covered or the site of the homes, and we have not tested anything Promise Robotics makes.

What did Promise Robotics agree with D.R. Horton?

Promise Robotics agreed to give D.R. Horton access to what it calls Factory-as-a-Service, or FaaS, for the production of more than 1,250 homes. The release says D.R. Horton becomes “the first major U.S. homebuilder to utilize the company’s production platform” and that this comes “as Promise expands its U.S. manufacturing network.”

The release describes FaaS as a platform that “takes existing home designs and translates them into a coordinated production process spanning robotic manufacturing, factory operations, and onsite installation.” The builder does not own the factory. In the release’s words, builders “can access automated production capacity without developing and operating their own factories”. The software side, as Promise describes it, reads a builder’s existing designs, generates production plans and robot instructions, runs the factory and links its output to work on site. These are the company’s descriptions of its own service. No independent account of how it performs has been published alongside them.

Two people are quoted. Ramtin Attar, chief executive and co-founder of Promise Robotics, says the company’s aim is to make the capability “accessible to builders across North America”. Brad Conlon, whose title in the release is senior vice president, strategic growth and innovation at D.R. Horton, says the builder is “continuously focused on improving cycle times, increasing production capacity” and that the platform “gives us a new capability to support those goals.” Conlon’s statement is the only word from D.R. Horton in either version of the release. The same quotation now appears on the Promise Robotics home page.

How large is the D.R. Horton agreement next to the builder’s output?

It is small next to D.R. Horton’s output: 1,250 homes is about 1.5 percent of one year’s closings, by our arithmetic on the builder’s own figures. D.R. Horton’s third quarter earnings release for fiscal 2026, published on July 21, 2026, says the company closed 84,655 homes in its homebuilding operations during the twelve months ended June 30, 2026. The same release updated its fiscal 2026 guidance to between 83,800 and 84,300 homes closed.

The share per year is smaller than 1.5 percent, because the agreement is multi-year and 1,250 homes is the whole contract. How much smaller cannot be worked out, since neither company has said how many years the agreement runs. The release also writes the number as “1,250+”, a floor with no ceiling.

D.R. Horton describes itself in the same July release as having been “the largest homebuilder by volume in the United States since 2002”, with 1.3 million homes closed in its 47-year history. Promise’s description of D.R. Horton as “America’s largest homebuilder by volume” matches the builder’s own wording.

Where will the homes be built, and is the Phoenix factory open?

The release does not say where the 1,250 homes will be built, and Promise’s own pages disagree on whether its Phoenix factory is running. The version of the release on the Promise Robotics newsroom carries a paragraph saying the company “plans to launch a new factory in Phoenix, Arizona, expected to begin manufacturing in early 2027.” The version on PR Newswire, distributed at 09:05 Eastern time on the same day and also datelined Phoenix, has no such paragraph. The word Phoenix appears in it only in the dateline.

The Promise Robotics home page goes further. Under a heading that reads “In production and expanding”, it says the company “is already producing homes at scale in three major cities” and lists Calgary, Edmonton and Phoenix. That sits beside the release’s statement that Phoenix will begin manufacturing in early 2027. The footer of the same newsroom page that carries the release lists the company’s locations as Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton, all in Canada.

Our reading is that the home page treats a planned site as a working one. Promise has not said so either way.

BetaKit, a Canadian technology news outlet, reported on October 13 that the homes are “largely single-story, single-family homes for buyers in the Phoenix, Arizona area” and that the Phoenix factory will be 16,000 square feet. We have found no primary document that states either fact, so they rest on that outlet alone. The same outlet reported that Promise’s factories can make interior and exterior walls, flooring, stairs and roofs. It did not say which of those parts go into the D.R. Horton homes, and neither release does.

How has Promise Robotics built up to this deal?

Promise Robotics went from a funding round in 2023 to a Calgary factory and a partnership with Mattamy Homes’ Alberta Division before this first United States agreement, according to its own newsroom. Each step below comes from a dated item on that site.

The 2023 release said the company was founded by Ramtin Attar and Reza Nasseri and planned to make its factory service available to “the broader North American homebuilders in 2025.” It said Promise “turns off-the-shelf industrial robots into ready-to-deploy production systems”, run by its own cloud software. The 1,000,000 square feet a year figure for Calgary is a capacity claim made before the plant opened. Promise has not published how much it has produced there since.

We have also reported on other robot makers’ commercial news, including Boston Dynamics Atlas robots starting training at a new center inside Hyundai’s Georgia plant and Agility Robotics Digit’s 2025 revenue in its merger filing with Churchill Capital Corp XI.

What have Promise Robotics and D.R. Horton not disclosed?

Neither company has disclosed what D.R. Horton will pay, how many years the agreement runs or what happens if the factory output falls short. The release gives no price per home, no delivery schedule and no number of homes a year. It does not say which D.R. Horton communities or which states the homes are for, or which components the robots will make for them.

D.R. Horton has said nothing on its own channels so far. Its list of 2026 press releases, saved on October 15, 2026, has no item on Promise Robotics. The latest entry is a notice that the builder will report fourth quarter and fiscal year results on October 29, 2026. Whether the agreement is mentioned there is not known.

Promise Robotics is private, so it does not file results. Its figures on capacity, savings and speed are its own and cannot be checked against a filing. The two versions of its release also differ on the Phoenix factory, and its home page describes Phoenix as already producing. Until the company says which is current, the start date for Phoenix rests on the newsroom version alone.

We have not tested any Promise Robotics system, visited any of its factories or seen any home built under the agreement. This report is drawn from the two versions of the October 13 release, the Promise Robotics website and newsroom, and D.R. Horton’s own investor relations pages, all saved on October 15, 2026.