SoftBank invests $200M in Swiss robotics startup Gravis Robotics

SoftBank has invested $200m in Swiss robotics startup Gravis Robotics, in what has been billed as a record investment. Gravis says the Series A funding round, in which the Japanese investor was the sole investor, is the largest Series A in construction robotics history.

It follows the Swiss startup raising $23m in a funding round in November last year. The Swiss startup, which was spun out of ETH Zurich university, builds autonomous tech for heavy construction machines.

It has built software which transforms existing excavators and other heavy equipment into autonomous machines, operating without human drivers, which carry out work on construction sites.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son sees the fast-growing robotics sector as a key tech channel for SoftBank, which has backed the likes of OpenAI, Alibaba, and Yahoo!, to invest in. The startup said it will use the funding to scale autonomous heavy machinery globally.

Dominic Jud, CTO and co-founder of Gravis Robotics, said: “Skilled operators read the earth through subtle physical feedback - listening to the engine strain, sensing the machine vibration and reacting to hydraulic resistance. Our AI takes that same physical input and grounds it in machine telemetry, responding to varying subterranean forces and soil mechanics at microsecond speeds. We didn’t try to simplify the world for our software; we gave it the physical intuition to handle real job sites with precision that goes beyond what any human can feel from inside the cab.”