Gritt's robot installs 4,000 solar panels a day, lands $26M to speed build-out

The race to blanket the planet in solar panels has a dirty secret: there aren’t enough hands to do the work. A typical eight-person crew can muscle through about 800 panels a day. Gritt, a startup emerging from stealth Tuesday, says its AI-powered system can boost that number to 4,000. The company just banked a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures to prove it, bringing its total funding to $34 million.

The brainchild of Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists Puneet Puri and Vishal Dugar, Gritt isn’t in the business of building bespoke robots. The company rents off-the-shelf skidders and Kawasaki-made arms, then injects them with its own AI models to handle the brutal, precise work of hauling and placing heavy glass panels onto metal frames with sub-millimeter accuracy. The immediate goal is to close a yawning labor gap on sprawling solar farms, particularly at remote sites where attracting workers is a persistent headache.

Andrew Beebe, the Obvious Ventures partner who led the round, draws a sharp line between lab-bound roboticists and Gritt’s team. “There are people who used to build rockets that went into space and had infinite budget for the smallest little part, and then there are people who know what it means to get into dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs and scale them like mad,” he told TechCrunch. “These guys are in the second camp.” One unnamed customer, one of the top 10 US power construction firms, is already sold on the safety angle, expecting fewer injuries now that a machine handles the 100-pound panels rather than a human lifting them overhead all day.

The startup has contracts to help install 2.8 gigawatts of solar over the next 18 months and plans to field 48 systems in six months. While competitors like Luminous Robotics and China’s Trinabot build their own custom hardware, Gritt’s software-first, hardware-agnostic bet could let it scale faster and leaner. The real hook, though, is what the new wave of AI models unlocks. Puri says training the system to tie rebar took just one day using the same underlying software that previously took weeks to learn how to stack cinder blocks. The vision extends well beyond lifting panels. The founders picture their sensor-laden platforms becoming a physical AI layer that flags an open trench ahead of a storm or spots missing inventory—turning a robotic installer into a site manager that never blinks.