Startup Gritt emerged from stealth after raising $26 million in a Series A funding round led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment. The round brings the company's total funding to $32 million, following a previous seed round that included First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.
Gritt was founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, CEO Puneet Puri and CTO Vishal Dugar. The company is building an intelligent system that, according to Puri, aims to help civilization build infrastructure faster by operating machines capable of working in the chaotic and unstructured outdoor environments that characterize construction sites.
Robots with off-the-shelf hardware
Instead of manufacturing its robots and vehicles from scratch, Gritt relies on commercially available hardware, including rented skidder vehicles and robotic arms made by companies such as Kawasaki. The company adds a software layer and artificial intelligence models to control this equipment, using data collected by the systems at sites to improve their behavior over time.
The systems' first task is to unload large glass solar panels, transport them to metal structures, and then place them on those structures with sub-millimeter precision so workers can secure them. Gritt says a team typically consisting of eight people can install about 800 panels per day, while the same team, working with its systems, can install between 3,000 and 4,000 panels per day.
Field deployment and expansion plans
Gritt currently has two systems operating at real-world sites, and the company says it has contracted to help install solar panels with a total capacity of 2.8 gigawatts over the next 18 months. Its customer base also includes three of the 10 largest energy construction companies in the United States, and it aims to have 48 systems operating over the next six months.
One of Gritt's customers, who spoke anonymously for competitive reasons, said the system could make work easier at remote sites where it is difficult to attract workers. The customer also expected injuries to decrease because workers would no longer have to repeatedly lift 100-pound panels over their heads.
Competition and applications beyond panels
Gritt competes with companies developing robots specifically for panel installation, including Luminous Robotics, Cosmic, and China's Trinabot. While those companies manufacture their own hardware, Gritt focuses on ready-made vehicles and robotic arms, a difference that could affect growth speed and cost structure as demand expands.
The company wants to add other tasks to its system, such as securing panels, drilling posts, and building the structures that support them, as well as labor-intensive construction tasks such as tying rebar before concrete is poured. Its founders say modern artificial intelligence models have made it more feasible to reuse the system across different tasks; training the system to stack masonry blocks took weeks, while a similar demonstration for tying rebar took one day using the same software.
Gritt envisions a broader future for what it describes as a physical artificial intelligence layer at worksites. In addition to performing manual tasks, its systems could be able to detect an open trench as a storm approaches and alert workers to cover it, or report missing inventory. These uses remain part of the company's long-term vision, alongside its current goal of automating solar installation work.