He Builds Factories That Build Solar Farms
Banks Hunter graduated from MIT in 2015 with a mechanical engineering degree and an itch to build things that mattered. He scratched it at Shaper Tools - a fellow MIT alumni startup - and then spent five years at Vicarious Surgical, where he joined as employee number two and watched the company raise over $450 million to bring robot-assisted surgery into the operating room. He knew how to grow a deep-tech hardware company from inside. He knew what it took to go from nothing to something real.
What he didn't expect was that his next act would begin with him and his co-founder, Max Justicz, hand-assembling solar hardware in their backyards. Not as a prototype. As research. They wanted to understand every bolt, every bracket, every awkward forty-foot section before they tried to automate it.
That backyard experiment became Charge Robotics - and the Sunrise system, the world's first fully automated solar construction platform. The company, backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Y Combinator, has raised more than $39 million to turn solar farm construction from a brute-labor bottleneck into something resembling a production line. Hunter calls it "the Henry Ford moment for solar." The comparison is exact: Ford didn't invent the car; he figured out how to make thousands of them. Hunter isn't trying to reinvent solar panels. He's trying to make solar farms as repeatable as any other manufactured thing.
We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar.
- Banks Hunter, Co-founder & CEO, Charge Robotics
850 Gigawatts by 2030. The Math Doesn't Work Without Robots.
To hit 2030 climate targets, the United States needs to reach 850 gigawatts of solar capacity. That means growing annual solar deployment roughly sevenfold. The panels aren't the bottleneck. The labor is. Utility-scale solar construction - dragging 800-pound steel racking systems across muddy fields, threading fasteners, bolting modules, running quality control across acres of sun-drenched nothing - is some of the most physically demanding, skill-specific, and geography-dependent work in American construction.
There aren't enough workers. The workers who exist can't be in multiple states at once. And the timelines are brutal. George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy - the nation's leading solar EPC contractor, which has built and manages 12 gigawatts of solar capacity across 25+ states - put it plainly: "It's clear that current solar installation methods can't scale to transform the grid."
7x increase in annual solar deployment needed to reach 2030 targets | 850 GW target capacity | 800 lbs per solar bay assembled by Sunrise | 40 ft length of each completed bay
Banks Hunter and Max Justicz saw this not as a policy problem or an investment problem, but as a manufacturing problem. And manufacturing problems have manufacturing solutions.
Sunrise: A Factory That Ships to the Job Site
The Sunrise system is a portable robotic assembly line. You ship it to a solar construction site in a truck. It unpacks. It starts working. It autonomously assembles steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and solar panels into completed solar bays - forty-foot, 800-pound finished sections of a utility-scale solar farm. Computer vision runs quality control throughout. A robotic vehicle picks up the finished bays and carries them to their final position in the field.
Nothing about this is conceptual. In February 2024, Charge Robotics completed its first real-world deployment of Sunrise with SOLV Energy. The system worked. The solar went in. And every construction professional who had offered the original verdict - "This will never work" - had to revise their position.
Autonomous Assembly
Sunrise assembles complete 40-foot, 800-pound solar bays from components without human labor on the line.
Computer Vision QC
Real-time quality control via cameras and AI - every fastener, every panel position, verified automatically.
Portable Factory
Ships to any job site. Deploys from a truck. No fixed infrastructure. No permanent installation required.
Robotic Deployment
A robotic vehicle transports finished bays to their exact field positions, completing the installation loop.
$39M+ to Automate the Energy Transition
Key investors include Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm), Lux Capital, Energy Impact Partners, Climate Capital, and UpHonest Capital - with Y Combinator providing the original institutional backing in the S21 batch.
The initial feedback was basically, 'This will never work.'
- Banks Hunter on the early industry reception to Charge Robotics
From MIT Backyards to American Energy Infrastructure
Hunter and Justicz - who studied mechanical engineering and computer science at MIT, class of 2017 - had discussed starting a company together as far back as their MIT years. When they finally did it in 2021, they didn't open a laptop and start speccing software. They went outside. They started assembling utility solar components by hand, in their backyards, to learn the work from the ground up.
This matters. The founders of Charge Robotics understand solar construction not as a concept but as a physical experience. They know which bolts strip. They know what 800 pounds feels like to move. They know what a solar bay looks like at dusk when the light catches the panels wrong and a computer vision system might struggle. That knowledge, earned in the dirt, is embedded in the Sunrise system.
Hunter's five years at Vicarious Surgical weren't wasted either. As employee number two, he watched a deep-tech hardware company go from a team of two to one that raised hundreds of millions. He knows the arc. He's run the playbook. Charge Robotics is a harder version of that story - the margin pressure is higher, the physics is heavier, the job sites are less forgiving than a hospital corridor - but Hunter has done this before.
A Straight Line to the Thing That Matters
Climate as the Problem Worth Solving
Hunter doesn't dress up the motivation. He and Justicz started Charge Robotics because they care about climate change and saw construction as the weakest link in the clean energy chain. Not the panels. Not the grid. The physical act of putting steel in the ground at scale. Every other part of the solar industry was moving. This part was stuck.
Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the big problem affecting many people.
- Banks Hunter
The Track Record
- Built the world's first fully automated solar construction system (Sunrise)
- Raised over $39M in total funding from top-tier investors including Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Energy Impact Partners
- Completed first real-world deployment with SOLV Energy - the nation's leading solar EPC - in February 2024
- Was employee #2 at Vicarious Surgical, which grew to raise $450M+ for VR-assisted robotic surgery
- Y Combinator S21 batch - accepted to one of the most competitive startup accelerators in the world
- Featured in MIT News for Charge Robotics' portable factory approach to solar construction (March 2025)
- Built a team of ~30 people in San Leandro, CA, tackling one of energy's hardest physical logistics challenges
Details Worth Knowing
Each Sunrise-assembled solar bay weighs approximately 800 pounds and spans 40 feet - a feat that previously required manual labor at every step.
Hunter and Justicz hand-assembled utility solar hardware in their backyards before writing a line of automation code. Research by doing.
Early industry feedback was near-unanimous: "This will never work." Charge Robotics completed its first deployment less than three years later.
To hit 2030 solar targets, the U.S. needs to grow annual solar deployment 7x. The labor force to do it manually doesn't exist. That's the market.
Hunter's co-founder Max Justicz studied both mechanical engineering and computer science at MIT - an almost implausible hardware-software founding split.
Founders Fund (famously skeptical of most things) and Lux Capital (deep-tech specialists) both bet on Charge Robotics - a rare alignment of Silicon Valley and hard-tech VC.
- MIT News - "Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories" (March 2025)
- Y Combinator - Charge Robotics Company Profile
- Yahoo Finance - Charge Robotics Completes First Deployment of Sunrise System
- pv magazine USA - "MIT-based startup launches solar construction robotics system"
- The Cooldown - "MIT graduates' startup develops revolutionary portable factories"
- Construction Today - "Charge Robotics Automates Solar Construction with Robotics"
- Crunchbase - Banks Hunter Profile