From: Mercom India
Planted, a company that develops automated systems for solar project deployment, raised $31.8 million to expand its robotic fleet and scale solar project deployment.
Piva Capital and RA Capital Management Planetary Health co-led the round, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Gigascale Capital, Google, and Khosla Ventures.
Planted’s solution combines project planning software, terrain-following solar arrays, energy storage, and field robotics.
The company said its technology can install solar arrays on land with slopes of up to 27% without grading. According to Planted, its system can also deliver twice the energy per acre compared with conventional project designs, allowing projects to use smaller land areas.
“Globally, solar needs to be deployed about five times faster than it is today to hit the scale experts project we’ll need by 2050, and the gap is growing as the industry confronts constraints involving supply chains, land, interconnection, and skilled labor,” said Eric Brown, CEO at Planted. “The way to close that gap is to turn the construction of a power plant into a manufacturing problem: building robots and deployment systems, not just projects. We have robots in the field proving the model works today. This round is how we scale it.”
The latest funding will support the expansion of Planted’s robotic fleet and the launch of Sage, its next-generation installation robot, which is scheduled to enter field operations in late 2026. According to Planted, Sage is designed to more than double field productivity compared with its current robotic fleet. The company is targeting a tenfold increase in field crew output through further automation.
Planted said its most recent project was a 28 MW behind-the-meter solar installation serving a neocloud data center. It has also completed the 11 MW Bowes Solar project in Illinois for Cultivate Power. Planted will next build Aligned Climate Capital’s Armoracia project on 16 acres. Planted deployed more than 10 MW in 2025 and said it is on track to deploy 100 MW in 2026. Its project pipeline exceeds 20 GW.
In July 2025, the company raised a $12 million funding round led by Piva Capital, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Team Builder Ventures.
In 1H 2026, VC funding activity in the solar sector decreased 40% YoY to $1.5 billion, down from $2.5 billion in the first half of 2025. Deal activity increased 9% YoY, with 35 deals in the first half of 2026 compared to 32 in 1H 2025, as per Mercom’s recently released 1H and Q2 2026 Solar Funding and M&A Report.
