Gravis Robotics Raises $200M for Construction Autonomy

Flannery's role in getting autonomous excavators to contractors helps explain the commercial ambition behind Gravis Robotics. The Zurich company has described a rental route for machinery equipped with its technology, placing an established equipment supplier between a robotics developer and the crew deciding how to move earth.

Gravis announced a $200M Series A investment from SoftBank on August 17, 2026, to support international expansion and hiring. Led operationally by CEO and co-founder Ryan Luke Johns and CTO and co-founder Dominic Jud, the ETH Zurich spinout builds systems that retrofit heavy machinery for assisted and autonomous work. The financing backs a business whose adoption depends on fitting advanced controls into equipment, service relationships and working practices already in place.

What the $200M Series A finances

The funding gives Gravis more resources to put its technology into construction fleets internationally. In the August announcement, the company connected the investment to global rollout and recruiting engineers and builders. It did not publish a revenue target, a unit deployment commitment or a customer pricing schedule in that announcement.

The transaction also has direct confirmation from the investor's legal advisers. Niederer Kraft Frey reported on September 3 that Gravis had closed a USD $200M Series A with SoftBank as investor. Cleary Gottlieb followed on September 4 and identified August 17 as the announcement date. Those later confirmations belong to the same financing, rather than another round.

Gravis had separately announced $23M in financing in November 2025, co-led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures. Its earlier release listed Pear VC, Imad, Sunna Ventures, Armada Investment and Holcim as participants. That historical investor group provides context for the company's development; the current announcement identifies SoftBank's investment without establishing that each earlier backer joined the Series A.

Keeping those events separate matters for understanding the expansion. A large new financing can fund a more extensive commercial operation, but the product still enters a purchasing process shaped by equipment availability, service coverage and the people responsible for completing the job.

Autonomy has to work with the machine and the ground

Gravis sells a retrofit approach to earthmoving autonomy. Its Gravis Rack brings sensing, computing and controls to existing machinery, rather than requiring the contractor to begin with an entirely new fleet. The company describes compatibility across multiple equipment manufacturers, an important consideration for buyers whose machines came from different suppliers over many years.

ETH Zurich's account of the technology describes 3D mapping and real-time AI combined with direct control of machine hydraulics. Operators can also use a tablet for remote operation. That combination puts the sensing and software close to the physical actions that determine whether the bucket does useful work.

Excavation gives automation an unusually active environment to understand. The machine changes the shape of its workplace as it digs, and its controls have to respond to the interaction between equipment and material. Software performance therefore has a physical consequence at each pass of the bucket, well before anybody can count an extra machine as a productive deployment.

Gravis offers a range of operating modes, including assistance for a person in the cab and autonomous work under supervision. The company reports productivity improvements of up to 30%, a claim that should remain attached to its source and conditions. Contractors evaluating a particular deployment still need to establish how performance translates to their equipment, tasks and site organization.

Rental access changes the customer conversation

The rental channel is one of the more consequential details in Gravis's earlier commercial announcement. The company described working with Flannery to offer an equipped excavator rental package, alongside deployments involving Holcim and a Taylor Woodrow infrastructure project at Manchester Airport. These examples explain how the technology can meet a contractor through an existing equipment relationship.

A rented machine gives the customer a different buying decision from a permanent retrofit across an owned fleet. The immediate assignment can be a particular job, with a familiar supplier involved in getting equipment onto the site. That is a useful commercial route for technology whose value becomes clearer through operation than through a software presentation.

It also gives the robotics business another relationship to support. A rental provider has to understand the equipment it supplies, and the contractor needs clarity about operating responsibility, assistance and service. Those practical questions belong inside the expansion plan because the route to market becomes part of the experience of using the machine.

The human role continues through that arrangement. Moving from direct operation toward supervising autonomous equipment changes where an operator's attention is required. Experience with the task, the site and neighboring work remains commercially relevant, while training and support have to make the newer controls usable within the crew's actual working day.

From ETH research to a supported field operation

Gravis emerged from ETH Zurich in 2022. The company's 2025 release identifies Ryan Luke Johns and Dominic Jud as operating co-founders and Marco Hutter as a co-founder and board member. That lineage connects research in robotic systems with the challenge of putting machines to work outside a laboratory.

The broader founding network includes Burak Çizmeci, whose role as a Gravis co-founder is identified by NCCR Digital Fabrication. The ETH Zurich Foundation also describes early work by Dominic Jud and Burak Çizmeci on remotely operated and semi-autonomous heavy machinery. Those origins put the human-machine interface inside the company's history, rather than treating it as a late addition to an autonomy product.

For the founders, SoftBank's investment enlarges the work around deployment as well as the resources for engineering. Equipment has to reach the customer, operate usefully and receive support when local conditions make the assignment more complicated. Each additional geography adds another set of contractors and equipment relationships through which that knowledge must travel.

The rental route makes the handoff tangible. A contractor can encounter Gravis through a machine supplied for a job, while the people delivering and operating it become part of whether autonomy earns another assignment. As Gravis expands, its research will keep meeting that very practical introduction: an excavator, a crew and earth that has to move.