Revolutionizing Solar Energy: Gritt’s AI-Powered Robotic Solution
One of the most important things happening on Earth today is solar energy production. Around the world, companies and countries are racing to deploy solar power and batteries to achieve energy independence and limit the effects of climate change.
Addressing Labor Market Challenges with Robotics
This development, however, faces a challenge in the labor market, with a limited supply of workers to meet growing demand for settlement. Robots could be a solution, but industrial robots have always struggled in unstructured environments, at least until now. The latest generation of AI models may have changed this equation.
Introducing Gritt: A New Era in Construction Robotics
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 came out of stealth Tuesday morning with a $26 million Series A funding round led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment. This brings its total funding to $34 million, following a previous funding round supported 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 really want to accelerate construction,” Puri tells TechCrunch, “you need intelligence that can operate in the outdoor, chaotic environments of these construction sites, and it needs to be generalizable enough to be able to operate in these varied environments.”
Innovative Use of Existing Hardware
Rather than building its own robots from scratch, Gritt uses commercially available hardware — so far, rented skidders and robotic arms built by companies like Kawasaki — to build platforms controlled by its AI models. The first task its systems perform is unloading large glass solar panels, transporting them to the metal frames where they are to be installed, and positioning them on the frames with sub-millimeter precision so workers can attach them.
Expanding Capabilities and Market Reach
“There are people who were building rockets meant to go to space and had an infinite budget for the smallest part, and then there are people who know what it means to take on dirty, boring, dangerous jobs and scale them like crazy,” said Andrew Beebe, the Obvious Ventures partner who led Gritt’s Series A round. “These guys are in the second camp, and he’s a special type of entrepreneur who has the technical skills, AI, and machine vision skills to make this work.”
Gritt currently has two systems deployed in the field, using the data they collect to improve their behavior. Puri says a typical crew of eight can install 800 panels per day, but the same crew working with Gritt systems can install 3,000 to 4,000 panels each day.
Today, the company says it has signed a contract to help install 2.8 gigawatts of solar panels over the next 18 months and that its customers include three of the ten largest U.S. electrical construction companies. The company hopes to operate 48 of its systems over the next six months.
TechCrunch spoke with a Gritt customer who declined to be identified for competitive reasons, but who was excited about the system’s ability to improve his work. He expects it will be easier to work at remote sites where it’s difficult to attract workers, and expects a reduction in injuries since workers will no longer have to repeatedly lift 100-pound panels over their heads.
Competitive Landscape and Future Prospects
Gritt competes with companies with their own panel installation robots, such as Luminous Robotics, Cosmic, and China’s Trinabot. These companies build their own hardware, rather than focusing on commercially available vehicles and weapons like Gritt, a difference that could shape faster growth and a leaner cost structure as demand increases.
Future Innovations and Ambitions
Gritt wants to add new manipulation tasks to its system so it can attach the solar panels, drill the poles, and even build the supports they sit on. Longer term, the company also wants to take on other common, labor-intensive construction tasks, such as tying down rebar before pouring concrete on top of it.
What enabled the startup to pursue this vision? Mainly, the rise of new AI models, the founders say.
“Creating a system for a solution was still possible to some extent five years ago, right?” Puri said, but AI now makes this work generalizable: the same underlying pipeline can be reused and improved from one task to another. As an example, he noted that training the system to stack cinder blocks took weeks, while a similar demonstration with rebar tying took only a day using the same software.
But training for new tasks is only the beginning of Gritt’s vision. The founders believe the suite of sensors and intelligence its systems bring to job sites can do more than just install panels; this can stimulate management and decision-making. For example, they imagine their system noticing that a trench is open as a storm approaches, allowing it to alert workers to cover it before rain damages components, or reporting missing inventory.
“Gritt now becomes this physical AI layer, which does this dexterous, labor-intensive task, and can further help you make decisions on site,” Puri said.
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