Gravis is adding autonomy to existing excavators, Serve is expanding deliveries through new partners, and 1872 is automating steel fabrication amid a welder shortage. Robots are gaining ground by fitting into existing machines and workflows.
Artificial Intelligence··Midday
SoftBank funds autonomy for excavators already on site
Gravis Robotics announced on 17 August a 200 million dollar Series A led by SoftBank Group, which the Zurich company calls the largest first round in construction robotics. Gravis does not build machines; it sells a retrofit control kit, Gravis Rack, and an assistance layer, Gravis Copilot, that bolt onto excavators a contractor already owns. The company was spun out of ETH Zurich in 2022 by chief executive Ryan Luke Johns and chief technology officer Dominic Jud, and says its systems run on four continents on machines from Caterpillar, Case, Develon, John Deere, JCB, Hitachi, Sumitomo, Yanmar and Volvo. Gravis claims a productivity gain of up to 30 per cent against peak manual operation, a vendor figure with no published method. Its named deployment is a project with Flannery Plant Hire worth 8 million dollars. The valuation was not disclosed.[1]
Serve opens to Grubhub as the Uber tie winds down
Serve Robotics said on 17 August that it will fulfil Grubhub orders in Chicago, Los Angeles and Alexandria, covering more than 100 participating merchants in Chicago and nearly 200 in Los Angeles. Grubhub belongs to Wonder, and the deal arrives as Serve's years-long arrangement with Uber Eats winds down. The same announcement opened Washington, DC and San Jose as the company's seventh and eighth markets, both with DoorDash, and put the first micro depots in Miami as a cheaper way to widen coverage. Serve also previewed Beacon, a countertop unit meant to let a restaurant take robot orders without changing its kitchen, and began rolling out Moxi 2.0, the hospital robot from its Diligent Robotics unit. Chief executive Ali Kashani framed each new partner as a way to raise fleet utilisation.[2]
1872 builds a robot steel shop against a welder shortage
Ars Technica reported on 17 August on 1872, a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers that wants to automate most of the steel fabrication process by 2027. Its first product is the steel skid, the rectangular frame that carries modular buildings, aimed at customers putting up AI data centres and small modular reactors. Chief executive Dan Summers, who led the team integrating SpaceX's Raptor engines, said the company is not committed to full autonomy and may stop near 80 per cent if the remainder brings diminishing returns. He framed the goal as building more with a shrinking pool of skilled labour: the American Welding Society estimates the United States will need 320,500 new welding professionals by 2029 as an ageing workforce retires. The company opened its Factory One site in Cincinnati on 22 July and works with Path Robotics on automated arc welding.[3]
