Gravis Robotics raises $200M from SoftBank to retrofit excavators

Gravis Robotics has raised $200 million in a Series A led by SoftBank Group Corp., in what SiliconAngle reports is the largest-ever Series A for a construction robotics startup.

The 2022 ETH Zurich spinout does not build excavators. It sells a bolt-on. Its Gravis Rack, which packages an AI chip, cameras, a lidar sensor and rear vehicle masts carrying GPS/GNSS RTS gear, clips onto machines from Caterpillar, John Deere, JCB and Hitachi and turns them into autonomous units that the company says enable "a 30% boost in productivity compared to driving these machines manually."

CTO Dominic Jud frames the technical bet as feel, not vision. Human operators, he says, "can listen to the sound of the engine, sense the machine's vibrations and react to hydraulic resistance to 'read the earth' they're digging through." Gravis trained its models in simulation to reproduce that loop. "Our AI takes that same physical input and grounds it in machine telemetry, responding to varying subterranean forces and soil mechanics at microsecond speeds," Jud said.

CEO Ryan Luke Johns pitches the market in infrastructure terms: "Whether we are building housing, scaling data centers or modernizing energy grids, every project starts with moving earth. That foundational work has been the bottleneck slowing down the entire built environment."

The system is already deployed across dozens of global job sites, and Gravis has an $8 million UK contract to retrofit existing excavator fleets. The article names no SoftBank spokesperson and does not disclose the post-money valuation. The round drops into a busy week of AI funding news on our tracker, one of 384 such stories we have logged in the last 90 days.