SoftBank Backs Europe's Newest Robotics Unicorn With $200M Series A

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-17

Switzerland-based Gravis Robotics just pulled off something remarkable. The ConTech company, which builds autonomous technology for heavy machinery, raised $200 million (€172 million) in a Series A round. That gives the startup a post-money valuation of $1 billion (€862 million), officially making it Europe's latest robotics unicorn. SoftBank is the sole investor in this round, which Gravis says is the largest Series A financing in construction robotics to date. This news follows a $22 million round in 2025, signaling strong and growing investor confidence in the company's vision. ### What Gravis Robotics Actually Does Founded in 2022 as a spinout from ETH Zurich, Gravis Robotics is led by co-founder and CEO Ryan Luke Johns, co-founder and CTO Dominic Jud, and co-founder and board member Marco Hutter, who is also a robotics professor at ETH Zurich. The company's core idea is refreshingly practical: instead of building autonomous construction equipment from scratch, they retrofit existing excavators and heavy machinery with their technology. Their product, the Gravis Rack, combines sensors, computing hardware, and software that can be installed on existing fleets. This means construction businesses can introduce autonomous operations without the massive cost of replacing their equipment. The technology has already been adapted for more than a dozen brands and models, ranging from about 22,000-pound equipment to substantially larger machines. ### The Vision: More Productivity, Not Fewer Jobs Ryan Luke Johns, co-founder and CEO, puts it simply: "It's not about taking operators out of the machine. It's about getting machines to be 30 percent more productive, to get an operator to drive multiple highly productive machines." That's a crucial distinction. The goal isn't to eliminate human workers but to make them dramatically more efficient. An operator can now supervise several machines simultaneously, handling complex sections of a job manually and then handing repetitive tasks back to the autonomous system. As Ryan puts it, "You press play, the machine will drive itself to the start and essentially do that entire job without intervention." The autonomous machines can handle driving, trench digging, bulk excavation, truck loading, and stockpile management. They're currently deployed across four continents, with customers and partners already seeing measurable results. ### A Broader Surge in Construction Robotics Gravis' Series A comes amid continued investment into European construction robotics, physical AI, and autonomous machinery in 2026. The momentum is clear across the continent: - Amsterdam-based Monumental raised $31 million to scale its construction robotics fleet - Espoo-based Hyperion Robotics secured $7 million for robotic microfactories - Nature Robots, Trener Robotics, Nomagic, KEMARO, and Exclaim Robotics also closed significant rounds Together, these adjacent machine-autonomy and industrial robotics rounds bring 2026 financings to approximately $93 million. Including Gravis, the selected funding total reaches roughly $293 million. Notably, KEMARO and Exclaim Robotics are also Swiss companies, highlighting an active robotics scene in Switzerland. ### Why Investors Are Paying Attention Archie Muirhead, Partner at IQ Capital (an investor in the 2025 raise), explains the appeal: "Ryan and the Gravis team identified a fundamental constraint facing construction at a time when demand for new infrastructure from compute to energy is accelerating – a shortage of skilled operators. Leveraging years of reinforcement learning and control policy research at ETH Zurich, Gravis's technology is already delivering measurable productivity gains on live projects across four continents." He adds: "This funding cements Gravis' position as the leading construction autonomy company building into an enormous global total addressable market." With a $1 billion valuation and SoftBank's backing, Gravis Robotics is now firmly positioned as a leader in the race to modernize one of the world's oldest industries.