Switzerland-based Gravis Robotics, a ConTech company developing autonomous technology for heavy machinery, has raised €172 million ($200 million) in a Series A round, giving the company an €862 million ($1 billion) post-money valuation – becoming Europe’s latest robotics unicorn.
SoftBank is the sole investor in the round, which Gravis says is the largest Series A financing in construction robotics to date. Today’s news follows a 2025 €19 million round – as covered by EU-Startups.
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.”
Gravis’ Series A comes amid continued investment into European construction robotics, physical AI and autonomous machinery in 2026.
Among the closest rounds seen by EU-Startups, Amsterdam-based Monumental raised €27 million to scale its construction robotics fleet and expand the range of tasks it can automate, while Espoo-based Hyperion Robotics secured €6.4 million to scale robotic microfactories for infrastructure projects.
Adjacent machine-autonomy and industrial robotics rounds from Nature Robots, Trener Robotics, Nomagic, KEMARO and Exclaim Robotics bring 2026 financings to approximately €80.2 million; including Gravis, the selected funding total reaches roughly €252.2 million.
Of note is the presence of fellow Swiss companies KEMARO and Exclaim Robotics – indicating an active robotics scene for Switzerland.
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.
“This funding cements Gravis’ position as the leading construction autonomy company building into an enormous global total addressable market.”
The company and its approach to construction autonomy will already be familiar to some EU-Startups readers as we interviewed Ryan in January 2026 for the EU-Startups Podcast as part of a five-part series recorded with Leonard, the innovation and foresight platform of the VINCI Group, during its Launch Day in Paris.
Founded in 2022 as a spinout from ETH Zurich, Gravis Robotics is led by co-founder and CEO Ryan Luke Johns and co-founder and CTO Dominic Jud, while ETH Zurich robotics professor Marco Hutter is a co-founder and board member.
The company develops hardware and software that can be retrofitted to existing excavators and other heavy equipment, allowing construction businesses to introduce autonomous operations without replacing their existing fleets.
Rather than building autonomous construction equipment from the ground up, Gravis has focused on making existing machinery autonomous through its Gravis Rack, which combines sensors, computing hardware and software.
According to the company, the technology has been adapted for more than a dozen brands, makes and models, ranging from approximately 10-tonne equipment to substantially larger machines.
Gravis says its autonomous machines can carry out tasks including driving, trench digging, bulk excavation, truck loading and stockpile management. Operators can also switch between manual and autonomous operation, allowing a person to take control for more complicated sections of a job before handing repetitive tasks back to the autonomous system.
Ryan adds: “You press play, the machine will drive itself to the start and essentially do that entire job without intervention.”
The company says its systems are now being used across four continents, with customers and partners including Holcim, Taylor Woodrow and HD Hyundai.
Gravis has reported productivity improvements of approximately 30 percent on several projects when compared with human-operated equipment.
Johns has stressed that the company’s goal is not simply to remove people from construction machinery, but to change how operators work with fleets of equipment.
Gravis is already deploying machines across areas including highways, utilities, oil and gas projects, quarries and data centre construction, where demand for new infrastructure is growing alongside investment in AI and computing capacity.
One of its ongoing initiatives is an €6.8 million ($8 million) UK government-backed project with Flannery Plant Hire, which will trial Gravis’ autonomous system across six excavators carrying out jobs such as trenching, bulk excavation and truck loading.
Gravis and Flannery also have a separate rental partnership designed to allow contractors to hire excavators already fitted with Gravis technology.
Gravis plans to use today’s funding to expand its team, enter additional international markets and increase the number of autonomous machines operating commercially.
The post Gravis Robotics becomes Europe’s latest unicorn after €172 million Series A appeared first on EU-Startups.
Source: EU-Startups
