SoftBank's $200M Buys A Retrofit Kit, Not A New Excavator

SoftBank has put $200 million into Gravis Robotics at a $1 billion valuation, and the Zurich company it bought into does not build excavators ^[1]. It fits autonomy kits onto machines contractors already own, which is where the money in this sector has been going ^[2].

Gravis was spun out of ETH Zurich in 2022 by Ryan Luke Johns and Dominic Jud, who met in Marco Hutter's robotics lab; Hutter is now a co-founder and board member, and the company employs about 75 people ^[3]. Its product, the Gravis Rack, packages sensors, compute and software into a kit that attaches to existing heavy machinery and works across more than a dozen brands and models, from 10-ton machines up to larger Caterpillar equipment ^[4]. Gravis says the Rack has been installed on Caterpillar, Case, Develon, John Deere, JCB, Hitachi, Sumitomo, Yanmar and Volvo machines without custom reprogramming for each one, and that roughly two-thirds of global heavy-equipment demand sits outside the top three manufacturers ^[5][6]. About 70% of its machines are used for digging, and operators can switch between manual and autonomous modes ^[7]. The company says the technology is in use in seven countries, with customers including Holcim, Taylor Woodrow and HD Hyundai ^[8].

The financing tells you how fast the repricing happened. This is the second round in under a year: a $23 million round in November 2025 co-led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures, with Pear VC, Sunna Ventures, Armada Investment and Holcim participating ^[9]. Total disclosed funding is now about $223 million ^[10], meaning SoftBank's single check accounts for roughly 90% of everything Gravis has raised ^[11]. Gravis calls it the largest Series A in construction robotics to date ^[12], and says the round is nearly double the amount first discussed ^[13]. On what was first discussed, the source reporting is not internally consistent: Tech Funding News summarises its own July story as SoftBank considering an acquisition for less than $500 million, while the body of the same piece says possibly more than $500 million, citing sources cited by Bloomberg ^[14][15].

The competitive set is also funded. Bedrock Robotics, founded by former Waymo engineers, raised $270 million in February at a $1.75 billion valuation and plans to launch fully operator-less excavators this year ^[16]. Built Robotics also sells a retrofit kit, Teleo is building single-operator control of multiple machines, and Caterpillar sells its own autonomous excavators, loaders, dozers, haul trucks and compactors ^[17]. Between Gravis and Bedrock alone, that is roughly $493 million in disclosed capital chasing autonomy on earthmoving iron ^[18].

The demand case rests on a productivity gap. McKinsey put global construction output at about $13 trillion in 2023 while construction productivity grew only 10% from 2000 to 2022 against manufacturing's 90% ^[19], a nine-fold difference in improvement ^[20]. The US will need 349,000 more construction workers in 2026 to meet demand ^[21].

Watch three things. Whether Bedrock ships operator-less excavators this year, since Gravis still keeps a human in the seat with a mode switch ^[16][7]. Whether the 70% digging concentration broadens into other tasks ^[7]. And whether Gravis ends up inside Robo HD, the vehicle into which SoftBank has already combined about 20 robotics companies including Skild AI, Agile Robots and AutoStore, alongside its $5.4 billion purchase of ABB's industrial robotics division ^[22] - a price 27 times the Gravis check ^[23].