Construction robotics company August Robotics has raised $30 million in new funding led by Big Pi Ventures to accelerate the rollout of autonomous robots that perform precision drilling on hyperscale construction sites, the company announced on May 21. The round closes a Series B that also drew participation from existing investors Blackbird, Skip Capital, Tanarra and Future Family Office, alongside new investor GS Futures, the corporate venture arm of South Korean construction conglomerate GS E&C.
The funding targets the unglamorous bottleneck in AI build-outs
The financing will accelerate physical-world workflows that use software-coordinated robotics to automate critical building tasks, the company said. August's modular platform ingests project plans, localizes robots on the floor, and autonomously plans and executes work in coordination with multiple machines while operating safely around human crews.
The company's newest robot performs downward precision drilling for large prefabricated sites, including the hyperscale data centers being raced to completion for AI and high-performance computing workloads. Once a concrete slab is poured, crews need thousands of precisely placed holes to bolt down server racks, power systems and cooling equipment. If those holes are slow to drill or even slightly off-spec, the trades behind them stall or rework the surface.
Drilling robots already in the field with DeWalt
August Robotics's drilling systems have been deployed at scale through a strategic partnership with Stanley Black & Decker's DeWalt brand, and the company says its robots are now in active service across hyperscale builds in the United States and Europe. The robots take coordinates from construction plans, move across the floor, and execute drilling work that is repetitive, physically punishing and intolerant of error.
“In recent months, our drilling robots have fundamentally changed what is possible in data center construction, compressing construction schedules and helping our customers to bring critical infrastructure online faster than ever before,” founder and Chief Executive Alex Wyatt said in a statement.
Lionel, the original floor-marking robot, scales worldwide
August's first commercial robot, Lionel, autonomously marks floors for exhibitions and large indoor venues. The platform has been deployed across more than five continents and has marked over 300 million square feet of floor area to date, providing the operational foundation on which the new drilling robot was developed.
A hot sub-sector inside the physical AI wave
August Robotics is the latest construction-robotics company to attract significant capital this month. Series B-stage construction automation startup Xpanner closed $18 million on May 14, and the broader physical AI category has now drawn more than $37 billion in venture funding globally so far in 2026, according to Crunchbase data, eclipsing the full-year record set in both 2025 and 2021.
The construction angle to that wave is tightly tied to data center capex. Hyperscalers are committing trillions of dollars to AI infrastructure build-outs, and the schedule risk inside that capex is showing up first in the trades. Capital is now flowing toward any robot that compresses time-to-power for those buildings. Related funding stories include Sereact's $110M Series B for warehouse robotics, Groq's $650M inference cloud round, and Sierra's $950M raise at a $15B valuation.
Reporting based on coverage from SiliconANGLE and August Robotics's announcement.