Cosmic Robotics is building machines for Earth, with an eye on Mars. Sep 9, 2026 Alex Every so often a startup's mission statement is so audacious it sounds almost like a joke, until you look at what they've actually built. Cosmic Robotics wants to build a city on Mars. Along the way, its robots are already installing solar panels twice as fast as human crews on some of the largest solar farms in the United States. Founded in San Francisco by CEO James Emerick and CTO Lewis Jones, Cosmic Robotics has spent the last year turning that ambitious vision into hardware that actually works in the field, and the momentum has been genuinely impressive. The company recently landed a spot in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, joining a $350,000 SAFE investment from AIM-listed SEED Innovations, timed specifically to convert alongside whatever larger round follows the accelerator. A problem hiding in plain sight. James Emerick's founding insight came from growing up around construction, working alongside his grandfather on job sites where, as he puts it, most of the tools in use were the same ones used fifty years earlier. Manufacturing and agriculture became ten to fifteen times more productive over the past half century through automation. Construction did not. The tasks still done almost entirely by hand, lifting, placing, and fastening heavy materials, are exactly the tasks robotics has struggled to crack, and they are exactly where Cosmic decided to start. Emerick brings deep, hands-on robotics experience from his time as a field robotics engineer at Built Robotics, where he helped deploy autonomous earthmoving equipment in live production environments, plus research work at Autodesk. Co-founder Lewis Jones brings serious aerospace credibility, having helped launch the world's first 3D-printed rocket at Relativity Space. Together they've built a team pulling in engineering leaders from Google, Amazon, SpaceX, NASA, and other frontier technology companies, a genuinely rare blend of aerospace-grade engineering discipline and hard-won field deployment experience. Robots that are already working, not just prototypes. Cosmic's flagship machine, Cosmic-1, is a 10,000-pound autonomous robot built for heavy-lift manipulation. In its current solar deployment, it picks up 90-pound solar panels and places them onto racking with millimeter precision, in conditions ranging from 100-degree heat to freezing rain, snow, and dust. It runs on Particle, Cosmic's proprietary AI platform that processes data in real time to adapt to changing job site conditions, and it is built to slot directly into existing construction workflows rather than requiring crews to change how they work around it. The results speak for themselves. Across tens of thousands of panel installation cycles on some of the largest solar farms in the country, Cosmic-1 has more than doubled labor productivity compared to manual installation methods. That is not a lab result or a simulated benchmark; it is a real robot, already earning its keep on real job sites, at a scale few young robotics companies ever reach this early. A vision that only gets bigger from here. The team has laid out a clear technology roadmap, and it is a thrilling one. They describe it in layers: the current terrestrial work on solar farms is unlocking supervised autonomy and collecting the field data needed to push further. From there, Cosmic is already expanding Cosmic-1 into hyperscale data center construction, one of the fastest-growing and most labor-constrained categories in the country, with roughly $7 trillion expected to flow into AI data centers, power, and compute infrastructure over the next six years, more capital than the Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, and the Interstate Highway System combined. Forty percent of US data center projects are currently running behind schedule, and skilled labor shortages are the single biggest reason why. Cosmic is positioning itself to be part of the fix. And then there is the moonshot, quite literally. Cosmic is already working with NASA on lunar construction robotics, treating everything it learns building solar farms and data centers on Earth as training ground and real revenue on the way toward its ultimate goal: robotic construction equipment capable of building a city on Mars. Recognition that backs up the ambition. Cosmic's progress hasn't gone unnoticed. The company earned recognition through the U.S. Department of Energy's American-Made Solar Prize and received funding support from the JLL Foundation, strong external validation for a company still early in its journey. Giant Ventures, which led Cosmic's earlier funding round alongside MaC Venture Capital and HCVC, summed up the appeal well: "Cosmic's team has the rare combination of deep construction expertise and aerospace-grade engineering, exactly the kind of team that builds generational companies." Why this one is worth being excited about. Cosmic Robotics is a small team, eight people, tackling one of the most important physical bottlenecks in the entire AI infrastructure boom, and they are doing it with hardware that is already deployed, already working, and already delivering results measured in real installed panels rather than promises. Backed now by Y Combinator alongside SEED Innovations, and with NASA already on board for the lunar chapter of the story, Cosmic Robotics looks like exactly the kind of small, ambitious team that could end up building the physical backbone of the next generation of energy infrastructure, here on Earth and eventually well beyond it.

Gritt exits stealth with $34 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 [...]. 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 start-up 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 $34 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 workers 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 US 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 its articles, NUBBIN may earn a small commission. This doesn't affect its editorial independence. NUBBIN(TM) SHOP ᡣ𐭩ہ٨ Nubbin News July, 2026 OpenAI launched its first piece of hardware last week - a fancy little keypad built to pair with ChatGPT. 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