Gritt exits stealth with $32 million for robots to build solar plants - then, everything else
Gritt is coming out of stealth with $34 million and plans to automate the hardest tasks on construction sites. One of the most important things happening on Earth today is the solar energy build-out. Around the world, companies and countries are racing to deploy solar and batteries to achieve energy independence and limit the effects of climate change.
Key Takeaways
- That build-out, though, is running into a labor market challenge, with a limited supply of workers to meet a growing demand for installation.
Robots could be an answer, but industrial robots have historically struggled in unstructured environments, at least until now.
- That brings its total funding to $32 million, following an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.
The startup is building an intelligent system to "help civilization build infrastructure faster," in Puri's words.
- "There are people who used to build rockets that went into space and had infinite budget for the smallest little part, and then there are people who know what it means to get into dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs and scale them like mad," said Andrew Beebe, the partner at Obvious Ventures who led Gritt's Series A round.
"These guys are in the second camp, and that's a special kind of entrepreneur that has the technical chops, the AI, and the machine vision skills to make it work.
- 8 gigawatts of solar panels in the next 18 months, and that its customers include three of the top 10 U.
The company hopes to be operating 48 of its systems within the next six months.
- Gritt wants to add new manipulation tasks to its system so it can fasten the solar panels, drill posts, and even build the racks they sit on.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Gritt is coming out of stealth with $34 million and plans to automate the hardest tasks on construction sites.
- #Gritt is coming out of stealth with $34 million and plans to automate the hardest tasks on construction sites.
- #The company exited stealth Tuesday morning with a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment.
- #That brings its total funding to $32 million, following an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.
That build-out, though, is running into a labor market challenge, with a limited supply of workers to meet a growing demand for installation. Robots could be an answer, but industrial robots have historically struggled in unstructured environments, at least until now. The latest generation of AI models may have changed that equation.
That's the driving idea behind Gritt , a startup founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, CEO Puneet Puri and CTO Vishal Dugar. The company exited stealth Tuesday morning with a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment. That brings its total funding to $32 million, following an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.
The startup is building an intelligent system to "help civilization build infrastructure faster," in Puri's words. "Our thesis is that if we truly want to speed up construction," Puri tells TechCrunch, "you need an intelligence which can work in the outdoor, chaotic environments of these construction sites, and it has to be generalizable enough that it can work in these varied environments. " Rather than building its own robots from scratch, Gritt uses off-the-shelf hardware - thus far, rented skidders and robotic arms built by companies like Kawasaki - to build platforms that are controlled by its AI models.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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