A startup founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists has just come out of stealth with $32 million to tackle a very specific bottleneck in the energy transition: installing solar panels faster. The company is called Gritt, and its pitch is simple to state, if hard to execute: an eight-person crew supported by its systems can install between 3,000 and 4,000 panels a day, compared with the roughly 800 a manual crew typically manages.

Rented robotic arms, not custom hardware

Unlike many robotics companies that build proprietary hardware from scratch, Gritt took a more pragmatic route: it rents existing equipment, such as skidders and robotic arms from manufacturers like Kawasaki, and controls them with its own AI models. The system unloads heavy glass panels, moves them to the metal racking, and positions them with sub-millimeter accuracy, a task that until now relied almost entirely on repetitive physical labor.

Funding and heavyweight customers

The $26 million Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment, adding to an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures. With that backing, Gritt already has contracts with three of the top ten U.S. power construction companies to help install 2.8 gigawatts of solar capacity over 18 months, and plans to have 48 systems running within six months.

What’s next: more tasks, more autonomy

Founders Puneet Puri (CEO) and Vishal Dugar (CTO) describe Gritt as a layer of «physical AI» that could eventually take on fastening panels, drilling posts, building racks, and tying rebar, on top of supporting site management. It’s a clear example of where applied robotics is heading: not replacing human crews outright, but multiplying what each person can get done on site.

Gritt’s approach also addresses a structural problem in the sector: solar plant construction is moving faster than the supply of skilled labor can keep up with. By relying on equipment that’s already certified and available on the market, rather than building its own robots from scratch, the startup shortens the gap between designing a solution and actually deploying it in the field, which matters in an industry where every week of delay carries a direct cost.

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Source: TechCrunch.