Swiss ConTech company Gravis Robotics has raised €172 million ($200 million) in a Series A funding round. The company develops autonomous technology that allows heavy construction machines to operate with less human control.
The new funding values Gravis Robotics at €862 million ($1 billion) after the investment. With this valuation, the company has become one of Europe’s newest robotics unicorns.
Ryan Luke Johns, co-founder and CEO of Gravis Robotics, says: “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.”
Archie Muirhead, Partner at IQ Capital (investor in the 2025 raise), said: “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.
Gravis Robotics was founded in 2022 as a spinout from ETH Zurich. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Ryan Luke Johns and co-founder and CTO Dominic Jud. ETH Zurich robotics professor Marco Hutter is also a co-founder and board member.
The company develops hardware and software that can be added to existing excavators and other heavy construction machines. This allows construction companies to use autonomous technology without having to replace their current equipment.
Instead of building completely new autonomous construction machines, Gravis Robotics focuses on making existing machines autonomous. Its Gravis Rack combines sensors, computing hardware, and software to give heavy machinery autonomous capabilities.
According to the company, its technology already works with more than a dozen different brands and models of construction equipment. These machines range from around 10-tonne excavators to much larger heavy equipment.
