Tech
Gritt exits stealth with $32 million for robots to build solar plants — then, everything else
One of the most important things happening on Earth today is the solar energy build-out. Around the world, companies and countries are racing to deploy solar and batteries to achieve energy independence and limit the effects of climate change.
That build-out, though, is running into a labor market challenge, with a limited supply of workers to meet a growing demand for installation. Robots could be an answer, but industrial robots have historically struggled in unstructured environments, at least until now. The latest generation of AI models may have changed that equation.
That’s the driving idea behind Gritt, a startup founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, CEO Puneet Puri and CTO Vishal Dugar. The company exited stealth Tuesday morning with a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment. That brings its total funding to $32 million, following an earlier seed round backed by First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures. The startup is building an intelligent system to “help civilization build infrastructure faster,” in Puri’s words.
“Our thesis is that if we truly want to speed up construction,” Puri tells TechCrunch, “you need an intelligence which can work in the outdoor, chaotic environments of these construction sites, and it has to be generalizable enough that it can work in these varied environments.”
Rather than building its own robots from scratch, Gritt uses off-the-shelf hardware — thus far, rented skidders and robotic arms built by companies like Kawasaki — to build platforms that are controlled by its AI models. The first job its systems handle is unloading large, glass solar panels, carrying them toward the metal frames where they need to be installed, and positioning them on the frames with sub-millimeter accuracy so workers can fasten them.
“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,” said Andrew Beebe, the partner at Obvious Ventures who led Gritt’s Series A round. “These guys are in the second camp, and that’s a special kind of entrepreneur that has the technical chops, the AI, and the machine vision skills to make it work.”
Gritt has two systems currently deployed in the field, using the data they collect to improve their behavior. Puri says that a typical eight-person crew can install 800 panels a day, but the same crew working with Gritt’s systems can install 3,000 to 4,000 panels each day.
Now, the company says it is contracted to help install 2.8 gigawatts of solar panels in the next 18 months, and that its customers include three of the top 10 U.S. power construction companies. The company hopes to be operating 48 of its systems within the next six months.
TechCrunch spoke to one Gritt customer who declined to be identified for competitive reasons, but who was enthusiastic about the system’s ability to improve his work. He expects it to be easier to work at remote sites where it is difficult to attract workers, and anticipates a reduction in injuries since workers won’t have to repeatedly lift 100-pound panels overhead.
Gritt is competing against companies with their own panel-installing robots like Luminous Robotics, Cosmic, and China’s Trinabot. Those companies are building their own hardware, rather than focusing on off-the-shelf vehicles and arms like Gritt, a difference that could shape who grows faster and with a leaner cost structure as demand grows.
Gritt wants to add new manipulation tasks to its system so it can fasten the solar panels, drill posts, and even build the racks they sit on. Longer term, it also wants to move into other common, labor-intensive construction tasks, like tying rebar before concrete is poured over it.
What’s enabled the startup to pursue this vision? Mainly, the rise of new AI models, the founders say.
“Making a system for one solution was still possible to some extent five years ago, right?” Puri said, but AI is now making that work generalizable — the same underlying pipeline can be reused and improve across tasks. As an example, he noted that training the system to stack cinder blocks took weeks, while a similar demo with rebar tying took just a day using the same software.
But training new tasks is just the beginning of Gritt’s vision. The founders believe the suite of sensors and intelligence its systems bring to worksites can do more than install panels; it can boost management and decision-making. For instance, they imagine their system noticing a trench is open while a storm approaches, allowing it to alert workers to cover it before rain damages components, or flagging missing inventory.
“Gritt becomes now this layer of physical AI, which is doing this dextrous, labor-intensive task, plus it can help you take decisions on the site,” Puri said.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Dimension Capital’s $800M third fund shows the intersection of science and compute is booming
While many newer VC firms are still struggling to raise fresh capital, Dimension Capital, founded in late 2022, has been raising increasingly larger funds in quick succession. On Tuesday, the New York firm — which invests at the intersection of science and compute — announced an $800 million fund, which is 60% larger than its $500 million second vehicle announced just 18 months ago.
When Zavian Dar and Adam Goulburn — formerly partners at Lux Capital —teamed up with Obvious Ventures alum Nan Li to launch the firm four years ago, they bet that founders would increasingly want to build deep-tech companies that crossed the boundaries of biotech and software. Now, the three partners admit to being impressed by how quickly their thesis has played out.
In 2024, they co-led a $30 million seed investment in Chai Discovery. The startup, which is developing open-source AI foundation models for drug development, announced last week that it raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation. The firm also backed anti-aging startup New Limit at its Series A round in January 2025. Earlier this month, New Limit, co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, completed a Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation.
The firm’s other notable investments include inference company Modal Labs and Anthropic. Dimension received shares in the AI giant after Anthropic acquired its portfolio company, the drug discovery platform Coefficient Bio this spring for a reported $400 million.
Tech
The Anthropic-Physical Intelligence rumor roiling AI Twitter
It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions — so big that most of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have each gone on buying sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI services shops, and product-testing startups to convert model capability into enterprise revenue and extend their reach faster than the other. Which is what made a weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence stand out. It spread exceedingly fast, even after a denial from Physical Intelligence’s CEO
Part of that ties to who’s involved. Physical Intelligence isn’t some obscure robotics shop. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley in recent years; it has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is apparently among of the more widely used robot brains in robotics research.
As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t completely spurious. Anthropic and Physical Intelligence actually did hold acquisition talks this spring, according to The Information, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post on X set off the frenzy — may have gotten the specifics wrong without being wrong that something had happened.
Physical Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it should be noted. According to The Information, Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports weren’t true via a Slack message containing a gif of a character from “The Office” shaking her head no.
Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, sent Monday night.
Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also, of course, now preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the largest U.S. stock debuts in history.
So why robotics, why now? The likeliest answer is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no amount of internet text can substitute for it.
OpenAI’s own history here is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut the entire robotics group down in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team came back in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.
Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a string of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog and a second phase in June that, according to Anthropic, found a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the year before.
Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would let Anthropic skip years of work. There’s a possible complication, though. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley, and its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund — also a major OpenAI investor — was reportedly involved in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year.
In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it isn’t just a peripheral player; it’s a stakeholder in a company that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently.
That raises questions around whether OpenAI’s early investment came with any information rights, or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the kind of protective provisions that large strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.
That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI — already a shareholder, already close to Groom, already trying to ensure it bests Anthropic in robotics — may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. We asked OpenAI these questions earlier today and the company didn’t respond.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Bluecore Energy raises $10M to build portable nuclear reactors on barges
Maritime nuclear energy startup Bluecore Energy on Tuesday said it had raised $10 million in a pre-seed funding round that was led by Slauson & Co.
Founded seven months ago by Kofi Asante, who previously worked with Uber Freight, Bluecore is building small nuclear reactors (SMRs) on floating barges with an aim to provide clean power to ports and nearby infrastructure. The reactors heat water and transfer the resulting steam into a generator, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity, Asante explained. The system is water-cooled in a closed-loop.
The energy expected to be produced on Bluecore’s barges can be moved by ship to its next location, reducing the emission involved in its transport to zero, Asante claims. Plus, he said the entire system behind the nuclear power plant only needs to be refueled once every few years.
Bluecore’s barges can also be docked near communities, and can connect to the power grid via subsea cables. The goal is to try to power the “equivalent of approximately 15,000 homes or scale to meet the power needs of a major port,” he told TechCrunch.
“We are able to utilize existing water-cooled nuclear technology that has been operating for over 70 years,” he said. “With a production line of small modular reactors that can be rapidly deployed on water, there is a pathway to provide clean energy to the majority of the country.”
Bluecore will be using the fresh capital to deploy its product. It has already secured a port terminal, barge, and test reactor pressure vessel, Asante said. “The test vessel allows us to simulate flow with water, which is the cooling source of the system. We are combining hardware with software testing to validate and verify the foundation of our design,” he added.
The startup is working with regulatory agencies to “embed the safest design decision” into its first product. Asante said the startup is building many layers of “safety and redundancy,” like having the uranium clad and protected in a thick steel pressure vessel and then padded with concrete shielding and steel lining.
Asante is hoping Bluecore may be able to help with the increasing power demand sparked by the ongoing data center buildout. “AI data center execs have shared with me that they would not need to pull water or energy from communities around them if they are able to receive their own source of electricity and have access to water that is provided at sea,” he said.
Other investors in the round include Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, and actor Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures, as well as a few angel investors.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Union open new era under Ryan Richter against Red Bulls
Trash Can Future Man Saves World From AI Apocalypse In Unhinged, R-Rated Sci-Fi Comedy
