The pitch is straightforward: don't buy a new machine, upgrade the one you have. Gravis Robotics sells a box of sensors and a tablet that, once bolted to an excavator, promises to turn a veteran operator and their rig into a semi-autonomous earthmoving team. It's a retrofit play aimed at the construction industry's massive, depreciating asset base, and it just secured a $23 million Series A to scale beyond its initial deployments with Holcim and other partners [Gravis Robotics, Nov 2025].
For a general contractor or a materials company running a fleet, the math is the primary selling point. The company's promotional offer, valid through May 2026, lists a weekly rate of $777 on a three-year contract, framing the technology as an operational expense rather than a capital outlay [Gravis Robotics, Unknown]. The claimed return is a 30 percent gain in output, alongside reductions in rework and improvements in safety, according to third-party reports [Tech.eu, 2025]. The system is designed to work within existing workflows, acting as a copilot in the cab before a software upgrade unlocks fully autonomous trenching or truck loading [Equipment Journal, Unknown].
The retrofit wedge
Gravis's commercial wedge is hardware. The core product is the Gravis RACK, a modular system containing AI processing hardware, cameras, and LiDAR sensors that mounts to a machine's roof [StartupHub.ai, 2025]. It connects to the vehicle's hydraulics and systems, and operators interact through a proprietary tablet interface called Slate. This hardware-first approach is a deliberate bet on the installed base. It bypasses the multi-year sales cycles and massive budgets required to sell new autonomous machinery to OEMs, targeting instead the fleet managers and site supervisors who feel the daily pressure of labor shortages and productivity targets.
The technology stack, spun out of nearly a decade of research at ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab, is what the company calls "Physical AI" [ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab, Unknown]. It fuses data from LiDAR, cameras, GNSS, and hydraulic feedback to create a real-time understanding of the terrain and the machine's state. In the cab, this manifests as the Gravis Copilot platform, providing augmented reality guidance for digging depth and people detection. The system's soil-aware AI is tuned for high-productivity tasks with excavators and loaders [Gravis Robotics, Unknown].
Traction beyond the pilot
Deployment footprint is a critical metric for any hardware-centric automation play, and Gravis claims its systems are operating across infrastructure and materials projects in seven countries, including the UK, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States [Equipment Journal, Unknown]. The company's LinkedIn profile suggests a headcount in the 51-200 employee range, indicating a scaling organization [LinkedIn, Unknown].
Strategic partnerships provide concrete validation. Global building materials giant Holcim, also an investor, is using Gravis systems for quarry duties like site preparation and stockpile management [New Civil Engineer, 2025]. The company has a project with UK contractor Taylor Woodrow and has cited Hitachi Construction Machinery as a "proven partner" for accommodating the open interfaces needed for its retrofit solutions [New Civil Engineer, 2025] [Hitachi Construction Machinery Americas, 2026]. This mix of an end-user investor, a contractor, and OEM collaboration is a promising early signals for a hardware retrofit model.
| Founder | Title | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Ryan Luke Johns | CEO & Co-Founder | Doctoral Researcher, ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab [Crunchbase, Unknown] |
| Dominic Jud | CTO & Co-Founder | Researcher, ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab [Crunchbase, Unknown] |
| Marco Tranzatto | Team Lead & Co-Founder | Robotics Software Engineer, ETH Zurich [Crunchbase, Unknown] |
| Burak Cizmeci | Co-Founder | Postdoctoral Researcher, ETH Zurich [Crunchbase, Unknown] |
The $23 million Series A, led by IQ Capital with participation from Zacua Ventures, Imad (the CVC of Nesma & Partners), and Sunna Ventures, among others, is earmarked for global expansion [Gravis Robotics, Nov 2025]. The round's structure is telling: it includes strategic capital from Holcim and Armada Investment, alongside traditional deep-tech VCs. This suggests investors are betting on the company's ability to navigate both the technical challenges of rugged autonomy and the commercial challenges of selling into construction and mining.
Where the terrain gets rough
The retrofit autonomy space for heavy machinery is not empty. Gravis enters a field with several well-funded competitors, each taking a slightly different approach. The company's most direct comparison is likely Built Robotics, a US-based pioneer in autonomous earthmoving. The competitive set also includes players focused on different but adjacent slices of the physical work automation puzzle.
- Built Robotics. The San Francisco-based company also develops autonomous upgrade kits for excavators and bulldozers, but has historically focused more on greenfield infrastructure projects in North America. Gravis's European academic roots and its early quarry material handling deals with Holcim may offer a different geographic and vertical wedge.
- Dusty Robotics. This competitor automates layout for construction floors, a different task (precision indoor measurement) but within the same broad industry and buyer profile (general contractors).
- Bedrock Robotics & Hive Autonomy. These represent other ventures in the construction and site automation space, though public details on their specific product focuses are more limited.
The fundamental risk for Gravis is proving that its technology delivers consistent, measurable ROI across a wide variety of machines, operators, and job sites. The 30 percent productivity claim, while cited in media reports, needs to be demonstrated at scale across different soil types, weather conditions, and work cultures. Furthermore, the retrofit model, while avoiding OEM sales cycles, introduces its own complexities: integration headaches across a heterogeneous fleet, maintenance liability for third-party hardware, and training for skeptical operators. The company's answer will be a growing list of referenceable customers beyond its investor-partners, renewing multi-year contracts based on hard data from the field.
The next twelve months
The immediate roadmap is clear from the funding announcement: accelerate global growth. For procurement teams at large earthmoving contractors or multinational materials companies, Gravis is aiming for a very specific profile. The ideal customer is a fleet operations director at a firm with a mix of owned and rented equipment, who is evaluated on total cost of ownership and site throughput, and who has budget authority for operational technology that promises a sub-two-year payback.
Realistically, that buyer is comparing Gravis not just to other robotics startups, but to traditional machine control and guidance systems from Topcon or Trimble, and to the eventual promise of fully autonomous machines from the OEMs themselves. Gravis's counter is that its system is autonomy-ready from day one, offering incremental steps from guidance to full autonomy without a forklift upgrade. The next twelve months will be about converting the seven-country deployment claim into a roster of named, paying customers outside its strategic investor circle, and demonstrating that the weekly subscription fee translates into a predictable, defensible margin as installation volumes grow.
Sources
- [Gravis Robotics, Nov 2025] Gravis Robotics accelerates global growth | https://www.gravisrobotics.com/press-release
- [Gravis Robotics, Unknown] Gravis Robotics Conexpo Offer | https://www.gravisrobotics.com/777
- [Tech.eu, 2025] Gravis Robotics profile | https://tech.eu/
- [Equipment Journal, Unknown] Gravis Robotics brings Physical AI to earthmoving | https://www.equipmentjournal.com/tech-news/gravis-robotics-brings-physical-ai-to-earthmoving/
- [StartupHub.ai, 2025] Gravis Robotics profile | https://www.startuphub.ai/
- [ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab, Unknown] Gravis Robotics spinoff page | https://rsl.ethz.ch/partnership/spinoff/gravisrobotics.html
- [LinkedIn, Unknown] Gravis Robotics company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/gravisrobotics
- [New Civil Engineer, 2025] Holcim using Gravis autonomous systems | https://www.newcivilengineer.com/
- [Hitachi Construction Machinery Americas, 2026] Hitachi partnership note | https://www.hcma.com/
- [Crunchbase, Unknown] Gravis Robotics founder profiles | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gravis-robotics