Autonomous construction on Earth and beyond
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2024 | Employees: 8 | Stage: Seed (Y Combinator S26) | Website: https://www.cosmicrobotics.com/
Cosmic Robotics builds robotic construction equipment. Its long-term stated mission is building a city on Mars; its near-term business is large-scale infrastructure on Earth. Its first machine, Cosmic-1, is a 10,000 lb autonomous robot built for heavy lifting. On utility-scale solar farms it picks up 90 lb panels and places them on racking within a few millimetres, reportedly across tens of thousands of cycles while more than doubling the labour productivity of solar installation, working in extreme heat, freezing rain, snow and dust, and fitting into existing construction processes without disrupting crews. The company is expanding from solar into hyperscale data centre construction and is working with NASA on lunar construction robots. The founders argue the limit on settling space is no longer launching rockets but building: thousands of construction workers will not be sent to Mars to build energy, computing and housing, so robots have to do it. Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco with 8 employees. Chief executive James Emerick grew up on construction sites, was a robotics engineer at Built Robotics deploying autonomous earthmoving robots in production, and worked at Autodesk Research on adaptive construction platforms, with an MS and BS in Mechanical Engineering from UPenn. Chief technology officer Lewis Jones was a propulsion engineer at Relativity Space with earlier experience at SpaceX, NASA JPL and NASA JSC, and holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from Caltech.
Cosmic is one of the few robotics companies here with machines working in the field and measured productivity gains rather than a demo video: Cosmic-1 has installed tens of thousands of panels on some of the largest US solar projects and more than doubled how much work a crew gets done. The Mars framing is marketing, but the business underneath it is sharp. Construction productivity has fallen for 50 years while manufacturing and farming automated 10 to 15 times over, and the missing piece is robots that can lift, place and fasten — exactly what Cosmic-1 does. Around $7 trillion is going into AI data centres and power over six years, and roughly 40% of US data centre projects are behind schedule, mostly for lack of skilled labour.
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