Gravis Robotics

Robotics · Construction Tech · AI

Funding

SoftBank pours $200M into Gravis Robotics, valuing the startup at $1B

Months earlier SoftBank had explored an outright acquisition valuing the startup at just half this new price tag.

• SoftBank Group invested $200 million as the sole backer of Gravis Robotics' Series A, pushing the Swiss startup to a $1 billion post-money valuation.
• Gravis, spun out of ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab in 2022, builds the Gravis Rack, a sensor-and-AI retrofit kit that adds autonomy to existing excavators from Caterpillar, John Deere, Volvo and other manufacturers rather than requiring new machines.
• The round is roughly nine times the $23 million Gravis raised in a November 2025 seed round led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures, marking an unusually fast leap to unicorn status.
• In July 2026 SoftBank had reportedly explored an acquisition of Gravis that would have valued it at over $500 million and folded it into a new SoftBank robotics venture; that deal was scrapped in favor of this standalone investment.
• Gravis says its retrofit systems are already deployed across four continents and can lift jobsite productivity by up to 30% by automating digging and excavating tasks.
• The deal signals SoftBank's continued appetite for physical-AI bets on labor-constrained industries, and shows retrofitting existing heavy equipment fleets can be a faster path to scale than building autonomous machines from scratch.