$200m · Series A · Robotics · Zürich, Switzerland
Zürich-based Gravis Robotics has raised $200m in Series A funding from SoftBank to expand its team, grow internationally and deploy its autonomous earthmoving technology across more construction sites and machines. The ETH Zurich spinout says the investment will accelerate a global rollout of its software and retrofit control system for heavy machinery.
A retrofit route into mixed fleets
Gravis sells the Gravis Rack, a modular control kit that adds cameras, LiDAR, GNSS and edge computing to conventional excavators and wheel loaders. Its software can assist an operator through the Copilot interface, support remote operation or run selected jobs autonomously. The company says the same core system has been installed on machinery from Caterpillar, John Deere, Volvo, Hitachi, JCB and other manufacturers.
That mixed-fleet approach addresses a practical adoption barrier. Contractors have already invested in equipment and depend on regional dealer, service and rental relationships; replacing an entire fleet with one manufacturer's autonomous machines would add capital and procurement friction. A retrofit platform can enter through existing machines and channels, while learning from deployments across different brands and sizes. Gravis reports productivity gains of up to 30% against peak manual operation, a company claim that will need to hold across varied soil, equipment and jobsite conditions as deployment expands.
The rollout test is operational
Founded in 2022 from ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab, Gravis has grown to around 80 employees and, according to ETH, is already used on dozens of commercial sites across Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia. Its system maps terrain while machines work and combines environmental sensing with telemetry such as engine load and hydraulic resistance, allowing the control software to respond to changing ground rather than treating the site as a fixed factory floor.
The Series A gives Gravis unusual financial capacity for that move from field-proven systems to broader commercial deployment. The company was also selected to lead an $8m UK government-backed CAM Pathfinder project with plant-hire group Flannery, which is retrofitting excavators for contractor access. SoftBank describes physical AI as central to its strategy, but the execution test is concrete: Gravis must standardise installation, safety and support across machine brands without turning every deployment into a bespoke engineering project. If the retrofit and rental channels remain repeatable, the same software layer can spread through fleets without waiting for contractors to replace their heavy equipment.
