- Federal Minister of Agriculture Cem Özdemir visits GROPYUS’ globally unique, highly automated factory for the prefabrication of building elements in Richen in Baden-Württemberg
- The technology-based construction company GROPYUS is driving the transformation of the construction industry with its digitalized, affordable and sustainable building concepts
- From 2025, GROPYUS will start in the Smart Factory with a production capacity of 250,000 square meters of gross floor area and an increase potential of 20 percent
Cem Özdemir, Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, visited the ultra-modern and globally unique GROPYUS Smart Factory in Richen, Baden-Württemberg, this Saturday. GROPYUS is currently massively expanding its existing production. The highly automated production facility, in which 50 robots produce wall and ceiling elements on two production lines with digitally controlled processes and over 120 specially developed robot tools, marks a significant step towards the sustainable transformation of the construction industry in Germany and, in the long term, allows for a cost-efficient, environmentally friendly and completely digitally controlled system Construction become reality.
“We face huge challenges when it comes to construction. We urgently need affordable housing, but at the same time construction must also become more climate-friendly and sustainable. Using wood as a building material opens up completely new potential. Wood stores carbon and can be processed serially and modularly in an efficient and climate-friendly manner. This is one of the reasons why we want to increase the timber construction quota in building construction with the federal government’s timber construction initiative. The timber construction initiative is also a strong signal for the necessary transformation and decarbonization of the economy,” said Cem Özdemir during his visit.
In the future, GROPYUS will develop multi-story, sustainable wood hybrid apartment buildings in the Smart Factory in Richen and produce them on an industrial scale. These are planned completely digitally, manufactured in a highly automated manner and then assembled, partly automatically, on the construction sites. The company relies on end-to-end digitalization that optimizes and accelerates the entire construction process – from planning to production and construction to building operation. The robots in the Smart Factory achieve a level of automation of up to 86 percent. As a result, GROPYUS reduces construction time by around 50 percent compared to conventional construction methods.
Markus Fuhrmann, CEO of GROPYUS, emphasizes the importance of these technological innovations: “Our Smart Factory sets new standards in serial timber construction. We developed the production system in a product-oriented simultaneous engineering process and are therefore able to go from planning to individualized production in a continuous process. With this facility we can not only build faster and more efficiently, but also pave the way to climate-friendly living for everyone. We want to use our technology to make a significant contribution to solving the housing and climate crisis.”
In the new Smart Factory, both wall and ceiling elements are manufactured in around 16 minutes per element. This efficiency, coupled with the use of sustainable materials and digital processes, enables GROPYUS to build more than 3,500 apartments or a gross floor area of 250,000 square meters every year. Since GROPYUS brings together all the competencies for system control, process definition and optimization, and mechanical engineering, the company expects to increase production capacity by 20 percent to 300,000 square meters of gross floor area per year.
About GROPYUS
GROPYUS is a technology-based construction company for multi-storey housing, founded in 2019, which contributes to solving the housing shortage and ensuring more climate friendliness with its highly attractive, affordable and sustainable building concepts. GROPYUS delivers its wooden hybrid apartment buildings turnkey from a single source. The combination of software and technology, construction, robotics and serial production allows the buildings to be created in a digitalized, highly automated and industrialized end-to-end process. The building system based on flexible elements achieves property-efficient, customizable planning and rapid construction execution in prefabrication and on the construction site, and is completed by a specially developed building operating system. In cooperation with established players such as Vonovia, GROPYUS is paving the way for the real estate industry to a sustainable, digital future. Around 400 employees work at the locations in Vienna, Berlin, Steinhaus, Richen, Dornbirn and Ruggell. GROPYUS was founded by, among others, Markus Fuhrmann (co-founder of the listed food delivery service Lieferheld/Delivery Hero), Philipp Erler and Bernd Oswald.
For its innovative strength, GROPYUS was awarded the “PropTech of the Year Award” in 2023 by the industry association ZIA (Zentraler Immobilien Committee eV) and the Ernst & Young “Scale-up Award” in the PropTech and Real Estate categories.
Further information at: https://www.gropyus.com/de.