Gravis Robotics, an ETH Zurich spinout, fits autonomy kits to excavators. A tie-up would extend Masayoshi Son’s robotics buying spree from the factory floor to the building site.
SoftBank is weighing a deal for Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup that fits excavators and diggers with the sensors and software to run themselves, according to Bloomberg.
The report did not spell out the shape of any transaction, and the size, structure, and valuation were not disclosed. The discussions appear to be at an early stage, and there is no guarantee they lead anywhere.
What they do signal is where SoftBank is looking next. Masayoshi Son’s group has spent the past year assembling a robotics portfolio at speed, from an $800mn round it is reportedly circling for Agile Robots to smaller bets on the kind of autonomy kits that bolt onto existing machinery.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Gravis Robotics spun out of ETH Zurich in 2022, from the Swiss university’s Robotic Systems Lab. Rather than build a robot from scratch, it retrofits standard heavy equipment, attaching a kit that fuses LiDAR, cameras, GNSS positioning, and hydraulic sensors so an ordinary excavator can trench, grade soil, and manage stockpiles on its own.
The company says the approach can lift site output by roughly 30%.
The kit has a name, or two. The hardware, Gravis calls Rack; the operator controls it through a tablet interface named Slate that switches between autonomous and manual modes.
The pitch is that a machine can be taught to feel the soil through its hydraulics rather than follow a fixed programme.
It is run by chief executive Ryan Luke Johns, an architect turned roboticist, alongside chief technology officer Dominic Jud and co-founder Marco Hutter, an ETH robotics professor.
Johns and Jud hold a Guinness World Record together for the largest robot-built dry-stone wall, which tells you something about the company’s temperament.
In November 2025 the startup raised $23mn in a round co-led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures, with Pear VC, Sunna Ventures, and cement group Holcim among the backers.
By its own account, Gravis now has machines working on active sites across seven countries. Its customer list, per the company’s own announcements, includes contractor Taylor Woodrow, which used the technology at Manchester Airport, plant-hire firm Flannery, and Holcim, which runs it in quarries. Those claims come from Gravis and have not been independently audited.
For SoftBank, construction is a logical extension of a much larger thesis. The group agreed last October to buy ABB’s robotics division for $5.4bn, and a four-bank syndicate only finished putting together the roughly $1.75bn loan behind that purchase this week.
It is also selling its remaining stake in Boston Dynamics to Hyundai, tidying up an older robotics bet even as it places newer ones.
The Gravis talks, if real, would join a run of similar moves. SoftBank led Agile Robots’ 2021 financing, the round that made the Munich firm Germany’s first robotics unicorn, and is now said to be anchoring a fresh $800mn raise there.
Earlier in 2025 it put $500mn into Skild AI, a startup building a general-purpose model to control robots. The common thread is machines that do physical work, and software good enough to run them.
Son’s pitch is that artificial intelligence has matured in software and the next frontier is giving it a body. SoftBank is reportedly preparing a US-based AI and robotics vehicle, provisionally called Roze, that it hopes to float at a $100bn valuation.
The wider market has moved with him, with global robotics investment more than doubling to $27.6bn in 2025, the year of record rounds for firms such as NEURA Robotics.
A digger that drives itself is a less photogenic proposition than a walking humanoid, but it may be a more immediately useful one. Construction faces a persistent shortage of skilled machine operators, and earthmoving is repetitive, dangerous, and expensive to staff.
Whether SoftBank ends up buying into Gravis, or simply kicking the tyres, the direction of travel is clear enough. The company that once bet on a chatty humanoid named Pepper now wants the machines that move actual earth.
