Gritt is a startup that uses artificial intelligence to control platforms built on commercially available robotic components, aiming to accelerate solar panel installations. The company was founded by Carnegie Mellon‑trained roboticists Puneet Puri (CEO) and Vishal Dugar (CTO). On Tuesday Gritt exited stealth and announced a $26 million Series A financing led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment.
That Series A brings the company’s total funding to $34 million after an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures. Puri says the company’s mission is to “help civilization build infrastructure faster” by deploying intelligent systems that make field work more efficient.
Approach: existing hardware plus generalizable intelligence
Rather than developing proprietary robots from scratch, Gritt assembles platforms using off‑the‑shelf hardware—so far renting skidders and robotic arms from manufacturers such as Kawasaki—and layers its AI on top to control them.
The first task the system performs is unloading large glass solar panels, transporting them to the metal frames where they will be mounted, and positioning them on the frames with sub‑millimeter accuracy so human workers can fasten them.
Andrew Beebe, the Obvious Ventures partner who led the Series A, said the founders combine the practical experience of scaling dirty, dangerous jobs with the necessary AI and machine‑vision expertise to make the approach work.
Field deployments, performance claims and contracts
Gritt currently has two systems deployed in the field and uses data from those deployments to refine system behavior. According to Puri, a typical eight‑person crew can install about 800 panels per day. The same crew working with Gritt’s systems can install 3,000 to 4,000 panels per day.
The company says it is contracted to help install 2.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels over the next 18 months, and that its customer base includes three companies that rank among the top 10 U.S. power construction firms. Gritt hopes to be operating 48 systems within six months.
A Gritt customer who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity for competitive reasons said the system should be particularly useful at remote sites where it’s hard to recruit workers, and that it will likely reduce injuries because crew members won’t have to repeatedly lift 100‑pound panels overhead.
Competition and expansion plans
Gritt faces competition from companies that build their own panel‑installing robots, including Luminous Robotics, Cosmic, and China’s Trinabot. Those competitors focus on custom hardware, while Gritt’s model emphasizes using existing commercial hardware—a difference that may affect growth speed and unit economics as demand rises.
Gritt plans to add more manipulation tasks to its system so it can fasten panels, drill posts, and assemble the racks the panels sit on. Over the longer term the company aims to tackle other labor‑intensive construction tasks such as tying rebar before concrete is poured.
Why now: AI makes generalizable field robotics feasible
The founders attribute their progress primarily to advances in AI models. Puri noted that while building a system for a single solution was still possible several years ago, modern AI makes the work more generalizable: the same software pipeline can be reused across tasks and improve with more data. He gave an example that training the system to stack cinder blocks took weeks, while a similar demonstration for tying rebar took a single day using the same software.
Beyond manipulation tasks, the founders envision the sensors and intelligence their systems provide could also support site management and decision‑making. For example, the system could detect an open trench when a storm is approaching and alert workers to cover it, or flag missing inventory.
Puri describes Gritt as becoming a “layer of physical AI” on worksites: performing dextrous, labor‑intensive tasks while also helping make operational decisions.
