SoftBank Bets $200 Million on Gravis Robotics' Retrofit Autonomy for Construction

SoftBank has invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, the Zurich-based ETH Zurich spinout, in what the company calls the largest Series A in construction robotics history. The round, announced August 17, values Gravis at $1 billion and gives SoftBank a minority stake — a sharp escalation of the deal Bloomberg reported in late July, when SoftBank was weighing an outright acquisition at a valuation above $500 million.

Gravis, founded in 2022 by CEO Ryan Luke Johns, CTO Dominic Jud and ETH robotics professor Marco Hutter, does not build machines. Instead, it sells the Gravis Rack, a brand-agnostic autonomy kit that retrofits onto existing excavators and other earthmoving equipment. The roughly 75-person company says the kit has been installed on machines from Caterpillar, Case, Develon, John Deere, JCB, Hitachi, Sumitomo, Yanmar and Volvo, with deployments alongside infrastructure companies on four continents. The round arrives nine months after a $23 million raise as Gravis expanded in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

From copilot to full autonomy

The Rack covers the full spectrum between operator assistance and driverless operation. In the cab, Gravis Copilot provides real-time 3D guidance and hazard detection; remotely, operators can supervise one or several machines over video links; and in full autonomous mode, machines can be assigned jobs that they execute without intervention. Gravis claims up to 30 percent productivity gains compared with peak manual operation, backed by AI models trained on large-scale simulated earthmoving before deployment.

Traction includes an $8 million, U.K. government-backed CAM Pathfinder project with Flannery Plant Hire, the country's largest operated heavy-equipment rental provider, to retrofit excavator fleets serving Britain's $716 billion infrastructure pipeline. Develon has also demonstrated its new 27-tonne excavator running autonomously on the Gravis system.

Why retrofit matters

The investment lands at the heart of a strategic fork in construction automation. Incumbent OEMs are building their own autonomy stacks into new machines; Gravis' pitch is that contractors should not have to buy new iron or commit to a single brand to access autonomy. With roughly two-thirds of global demand for heavy equipment sitting outside the top three manufacturers, Gravis positions the Rack as an operating system for mixed fleets that protects existing fleet investments.

For machine operators, that means a role shift rather than replacement: repetitive, high-volume tasks such as trenching and truck loading are automated, while skilled operators handle complex work and supervise autonomous machines from safe positions. For fleet managers and buyers, it lowers the entry threshold — autonomy can be phased in across an existing fleet instead of requiring a wholesale replacement program.

SoftBank's physical AI bet

SoftBank Managing Director Dai Sakata framed the investment as part of a broader "physical AI" push, following the group's $5.375 billion acquisition of ABB's robotics division last October and its sale of its Boston Dynamics stake this summer. The capital gives Gravis a commanding war chest relative to retrofit rivals such as SafeAI, which focuses on mining, and Teleo, which offers supervised-autonomy retrofit kits for construction equipment.

Gravis still has to prove that retrofit autonomy can scale beyond pilots and hold its own against OEM-built systems. With a billion-dollar valuation and SoftBank's backing, it now has the resources to try.

SoftBank Bets $200 Million on Gravis Robotics' Retrofit Autonomy for Construction

From copilot to full autonomy

Why retrofit matters

SoftBank's physical AI bet

Sources