There is a straightforward problem at the heart of the global solar build-out. The hardware is cheap. Solar panel costs have fallen roughly 90% over the past decade. What remains stubbornly expensive is the human labour to install them, and there simply are not enough workers to keep up with demand.
The US solar industry alone is projected to need around 355,000 workers by late 2026 to hit its installation targets of 60 to 70 gigawatts per year. It currently has about 280,000. That shortfall of 53,000 people is not a gap that training programmes can close in 18 months. It is the structural problem that a new wave of construction robotics companies is trying to solve.
Gritt, founded in 2023 by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, is the latest and most funded entrant. The company just closed a $26 million Series A, bringing its total raised to $34 million. Investors include Obvious Ventures and Union Square Ventures, with earlier backing from First Round Capital.
What makes Gritt's approach worth paying attention to is not just the money, but the method. Rather than designing and building robots from scratch, the team takes standard construction equipment, things like skid steers and robotic arms already used on job sites, and adds its own AI software to control them. A crew installs around 800 panels per day without the system. With it, the same crew reportedly installs 3,000 to 4,000. That is roughly a four-fold increase in output without hiring more people.
The competitive field is growing. Luminous Robotics, which has raised about $3.5 million, is already operating at solar farms in Australia. Cosmic Robotics, with $4 million raised, has a machine called the Cosmic-1A that places a panel every 30 to 40 seconds. China's Trinabot is also building dedicated hardware for the same task. Most of these companies build their own purpose-built machines. Gritt does not, and that is a genuine strategic difference: using existing equipment is cheaper to deploy, easier to adopt, and means the company can scale without waiting on manufacturing capacity.
Gritt's commercial position is further along than you would expect for a company this young. It already has contracts to help install 2.8 gigawatts of solar over the next 18 months, with three of the ten largest US power construction firms as customers. It has two systems deployed in the field today and plans 48 within six months.
The safety angle matters too, and tends to be overlooked in coverage of robotics. Solar panel installation crews repeatedly lift panels weighing around 45 kilograms in heat, often in remote locations where medical care is far away. Automating the lifting and carrying reduces injuries, which also reduces insurance costs and worker attrition.
Longer term, Gritt wants to move beyond panel placement into rebar tying, rack construction, and concrete work. The company's argument is that the same AI that learns to handle a solar panel can be retrained for a new task relatively quickly. Teaching the system to stack cinder blocks apparently took weeks. Retraining it for rebar took a single day.
For business operators outside the energy sector, the relevance is indirect but real. Energy costs are an input cost for almost every industry. Anything that speeds up solar installation and lowers its labour cost adds supply to the grid faster, which puts downward pressure on electricity prices over time. The construction sector itself is also watching, because the same software that places solar panels could, in principle, operate on any large outdoor job site.
The workers on these crews are not being eliminated. They are being repositioned. The human crew with a Gritt system still fastens the panels, manages the site, and oversees the machines. But fewer workers are needed for the same output, and those workers are doing less of the physically punishing work. For companies struggling to recruit in remote areas, that is a meaningful difference in attractiveness as an employer.