SoftBank puts $200M Into New European Unicorn Gravis Robotics

SoftBank has written a $200 million cheque to Swiss robotics startup Gravis Robotics, and it gets the whole Series A to itself. The company says the round is the largest ever Series A in construction robotics, and the deal values it at about $1 billion, enough to put Gravis into unicorn territory in Europe.

That is a sharp jump from the money it raised only last November: $23 million, led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures, with backing from Pear VC, Sunna Ventures, Armada Investment and Holcim. Bloomberg had already reported that SoftBank was circling a deal that would have priced the company above $500 million. The final number came in well above that.

Gravis was founded in 2022 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab. It is run by CEO Ryan Luke Johns and CTO Dominic Jud, with ETH robotics professor Marco Hutter as co-founder and board member. The company is based in Zurich and also has offices in Austin and Oxford.

Its pitch is not to build a brand-new autonomous excavator. Instead, Gravis retrofits existing earthmoving machines with the Gravis Rack, a kit of sensors, computing hardware and software. The company says the system is already on machines from Caterpillar, Case, Develon, John Deere, JCB, Hitachi, Sumitomo, Yanmar and Volvo, covering everything from roughly ten-tonne equipment to much larger models.

The software is built on models trained in simulation and then moved into real jobsites. Gravis says that lets the machines handle changing soil conditions and hydraulic resistance, with modes ranging from a copilot that adds 3D guidance and hazard detection to full autonomy where one person supervises multiple machines. The list of automated tasks includes driving, trenching, bulk excavation, truck loading and stockpile management. The company says productivity can rise by up to 30 percent, based on its own project data.

Gravis says its systems are already deployed on four continents, with customers and partners including Holcim, Taylor Woodrow and HD Hyundai. In the UK, it is part of a government-backed CAM Pathfinder project worth $8 million with Flannery Plant Hire, retrofitting six excavators. The new money is meant for hiring, more international markets and more autonomous machines in commercial use. For SoftBank, it fits a wider robotics push that now includes around 20 robotics holdings in Robo HD, the $5.4 billion acquisition of ABB’s industrial robotics division, and a planned US-listed AI and robotics company called Roze.