Gritt Launches with $32.4M to Build Physical AI for Accelerating the World's Infrastructure Buildout

Gritt's intelligent systems ride on existing jobsite equipment to perform labor-intensive tasks and build infrastructure rapidly

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gritt, the company building an intelligent system combining robotics and AI to accelerate the world’s infrastructure buildout, launched today with $32.4M in pre-seed and Series A funding. The $26M Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investments, and support from previous investors First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.

Gritt’s robotic arms and AI connect to existing jobsite equipment, such as skid steers and forklifts, enabling the system to pick and place, assemble, and transport materials with millimeter precision in ever-changing environments. Gritt’s system learns quickly from every deployment and is highly adaptable, so a task that took months to train the first time now only takes days. By deploying its machines across large-scale construction sites, Gritt can capture and process real-time data on completed work, material movement, and site conditions, using its intelligence to help supervisors make better decisions.

"Every industry has embraced automation, but outdoor construction sites are exposed, with unforgiving terrain and variable weather. You can't tell a construction site to be less muddy or to stop snowing,” said Puneet Puri, CEO and co-founder of Gritt. “Gritt's physical AI is designed to work in this unstructured, outdoor world. Infrastructure is what moves civilization forward, and now Gritt can help build it faster — including solar arrays, data centers, bridges, and roads.”

More than 41% of the U.S. construction workforce is expected to retire by 2031, and the industry is already facing major labor shortages. While most other industries have achieved significant gains through AI and automation, construction has experienced a 46% decline in productivity. Unpredictable and chaotic weather, terrain, and logistics make outdoor construction difficult to automate. Gritt uses a unique combination of proprietary AI and pragmatic hardware to solve the problem.

“Nobody is solving the repetitive, high-volume manual work that shapes the world’s infrastructure," said Vishal Dugar, CTO and co-founder at Gritt. “We need an intelligence layer that can complete dexterous tasks and make decisions in an environment that changes every hour. This is one of the most challenging frontiers in physical AI.”

The Gritt team has spent their careers making autonomy work in unforgiving environments, and its machines are already on real sites, trusted by top 10 U.S. construction companies, including those building massive solar farms. Rather than replacing existing equipment, Gritt's systems attach to the proven hardware that crews already own and know how to maintain. This allows them to operate safely alongside workers within strict safety bounds while executing thousands of precise, repetitive movements without a miss. This has enabled the autonomous placement of tens of thousands of solar panels with zero breakages.

"Every wave of automation started with someone willing to go where the work was hardest and least predictable," said Andrew Beebe, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures. "Gritt is bringing physical AI to the toughest construction sites in the world. Every site they deploy builds the flywheel that makes the system smarter and more capable. That's a compounding advantage that's challenging to replicate from the outside. We look forward to helping Gritt build this new and ambitious category in physical AI."

In the future, Gritt’s decision-making intelligence layer can act as a powerful agent for general site supervisors, understanding resource flows, anticipating problems, and even directly making the calls to keep a project moving. The goal is to create a healthy construction market where workers trade the dangerous, backbreaking tasks for ones worth showing up for, contractors build in months what used to take years, and society is better served.

About Gritt

Gritt is an intelligent system that combines robotics and AI to build the infrastructure that pulls society forward. Gritt deploys via simple attachments to common equipment found on construction sites and autonomously performs labor-intensive tasks, verification, and planning. Gritt systems are already building critical infrastructure in the harshest outdoor environments, starting with large-scale solar. The founding team includes experts in robotics and AI from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT. Gritt is backed by Obvious Ventures, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and other leading firms. Learn more at gritt.ai.