Zuru’s not toying with building - it aims for global disruption

Friday, 18 July 2025

Global toy giant Zuru is setting up a mega factory that will produce 10,000 square metres of buildings every day, and it will be testing its product on Malibu land purchased after the fires.

It was part of the fast growing consumer product and tech company’s mission to “completely revolutionise the cost of building a building”, co-founder and chief executive Nick Mowbray said.

Mowbray, who was speaking at the China Business Summit in Auckland on Friday, also let it slip that on the back of that mission Zuru was developing a new business in home appliances connected through the internet of things.

“Whether that is your home security, your robo vacuum cleaner or your robo mower, we’re building that up,” he said.

“We’ve actually just acquired a Chinese robot mower company that is really advanced in its neural events and vision, so we're going downstream as well. It’s a big project, but we’re going pretty fast on it.”

But Mowbray focused much of his presentation on the company’s goal to disrupt the traditional manufacture of homes and commercial buildings globally, and how it would do so.

They were revolutionising the way people build from start to finish, and optimising everything from design, compliance, manufacturing all the way through to assembly, he said.

There were two parts to that. One part would be the world's first factory with a fully customised input in terms of design, and a fully automated output. That factory was currently being built on a 10.1 hectare site in China.

The second part of it was the building information modelling software, called Dreamcatcher, that Zuru Tech has developed. It was directly connected to automated production systems, and allowed users to design, price, and manufacture buildings easily and efficiently.

Dreamcatcher included an AI assistant that users could talk to as they designed, decorated and furnished the house they wanted.

Mowbray said it was revolutionary, as it was able to work out building codes for any location, adjust for any terrain, simulate for daylight, and calculate key structural, electrical and plumbing requirements.

Working out how the software integrated with the hardware had been an incredibly complex problem to solve, he said.

To do so, they had built first a prototype factory that built houses on a one quarter scale, and then a 3.5ha test factory in China. That factory was now building a full size house or building every one to two weeks.

They were continually debugging, adapting and improving the software and hardware, and the next stage was the commercial factory currently being built, he said.

“It’ll be the third or second largest factory in the world and will be able to produce 10,000 square metres of buildings every single day.

“It is going to completely change the cost structure of building buildings from start to finish, as we’re building for hundreds of dollars a square metre rather than thousands of dollars a square metre, and we're building at the highest quality in the world.”

Before commercialising the system and opening it up for people to use long term, it would work on some projects internally, and the first of those would be on 12 sections of waterfront land it bought in Malibu after the fires, he said.

“The complexity of building a factory that has fully customised and automated output, it's hard to underestimate and to do it for every location in the world, it's really difficult.

“But I would say that hopefully in the next two or three years we can start working with outside customers.”

Mowbray said the new building technology would be targeted at the mass market, and the goal was to be completely disruptive on price.

“We haven't said how we are going to price it, but it'll probably work based on supply and demand and some kind of algorithm eventually.”

The commercial factory and system Zuru was building would also produce less waste and be more sustainable than traditional building practices, he added.