Gritt Raises $26 Million to Put AI-Powered Robots on Solar Construction Sites

The Carnegie Mellon-trained founders’ startup says it is building AI-controlled systems to help address labor constraints in solar construction.

Gritt has exited stealth with a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures, bringing the robotics startup’s total funding to $32 million as it develops systems for solar-panel construction.

The company was founded by Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists Puneet Puri, its chief executive, and Vishal Dugar, its chief technology officer. Gritt is targeting a persistent challenge in the solar build-out: a limited supply of workers as demand for installation grows.

Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment participated in the Series A. Gritt’s earlier seed round was backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures.

Rather than build robots from scratch, Gritt uses off-the-shelf hardware, including rented skidders and robotic arms from companies such as Kawasaki, as platforms controlled by its AI models.

Its first task is handling large glass solar panels: unloading them and carrying them toward the metal mounting frame. The company’s broader aim, in Puri’s words, is to help civilization build infrastructure faster by developing intelligence that can operate in outdoor, chaotic construction environments and generalize across varied sites.

That focus addresses a difficult fit for traditional industrial robots. Solar projects require equipment to work outdoors and around changing conditions, while handling panels that must be moved carefully. Gritt is betting that newer AI models can make commercially available machinery more useful in those environments.

The funding reflects investor interest in automation for a solar construction market where installation labor remains a constraint. Whether Gritt’s software can deliver reliable performance across active job sites will be central to its effort to turn that premise into broader deployment.