Robots for solar-panel installation raise a crew's daily output several-fold

Gritt exits stealth with $32M to automate the labor-heavy work of building solar plants, starting with panel placement.

Gritt, a startup automating solar plant construction with AI-controlled robotic systems, exited stealth on a Tuesday morning. The company raised a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment participating. Including an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital and others, total funding reached $32 million. Founders Puneet Puri (CEO) and Vishal Dugar (CTO) were both trained at Carnegie Mellon.

Rather than build its own machines, Gritt uses off-the-shelf hardware, including rented skidders and robotic arms from companies like Kawasaki. The first task its systems handle is unloading, carrying, and positioning roughly 100-pound glass panels onto metal frames with sub-millimeter accuracy, leaving workers to fasten them. Puri says a typical eight-person crew installs 800 panels a day, while the same crew with Gritt's systems installs 3,000 to 4,000. Two systems are deployed, and the company is contracted to help install 2.8 gigawatts over the next 18 months.

Labor is a major driver of clean-energy build costs. If installation output per crew rises several-fold, the cost per installed watt falls and projects finish faster, making solar cheaper to deploy at scale. Gritt says its customers include three of the top 10 US power construction companies, and it aims to operate 48 systems within six months.

Watch whether deployed systems hit the claimed productivity. The panel-per-day figures come from Puri, one customer interviewed declined to be named and spoke about expected rather than realized benefits, and the contracts and deployment targets are company claims. Competitors including Luminous Robotics, Cosmic, and China's Trinabot are building their own installing robots.

Source: TechCrunch