Automating construction with self-driving diggers: Waymo vets launch Bedrock Robotics with $80 million

Ontario Construction News staff writer

A team of veteran engineers from Alphabet’s self-driving car unit Waymo is tackling the construction industry, launching a new company, Bedrock Robotics, with $80 million in funding to automate excavators and other heavy machinery amid a severe shortage of skilled labour. The move comes just one day after a major competitor was acquired, signaling a rapid escalation in the race to bring full autonomy to the world’s job sites.

On July 16, the San Francisco-based startup emerged from stealth mode to announce its ambitious plans, backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors who are betting that the team that helped pioneer autonomous cars can successfully pivot to self-driving dirt diggers.

A new power player emerges from stealth

Bedrock Robotics’ public debut is supported by a formidable $80 million in capital, raised through a combination of Seed and Series A funding rounds. The Series A round was led by 8VC, a technology investment firm with deep experience in logistics and industrial sectors, while the May 2024 Seed round was led by Eclipse, a venture firm specializing in the digitalization of physical industries.

The syndicate of investors underscores the strategic confidence in Bedrock’s mission. Participants include deep-tech venture firms Two Sigma Ventures and Valor Equity Partners; Nvidia’s corporate venture arm, NVentures; and the global real estate developer Tishman Speyer. Additional backers include Crossbeam Venture Partners, the Raine Group, Atreides Management, Al Rajhi Partners, and Samsara Ventures. The involvement of a major real estate player like Tishman Speyer signals direct industry validation, providing Bedrock with a potential customer and an invaluable source of market feedback. Similarly, the investment from NVentures suggests a deep technical alignment with Nvidia, the dominant force in AI computing hardware.

The company was founded in 2024 by a group of engineers led by CEO Boris Sofman, who previously served as a senior director of engineering and head of trucking at Waymo. Sofman, who holds a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, also co-founded and led the consumer robotics firm Anki, whose talent was later partly acqui-hired by Waymo after it ceased operations. He is joined by two other former Waymo colleagues and Tom Eliaz, founder of the data platform Sement.

The launch of Bedrock Robotics highlights a significant trend in the technology sector: the migration of elite talent from the first wave of on-road autonomous vehicle development into adjacent, high-value industrial markets. The founders of key competitors also trace their origins to the pioneering self-driving programs at Google, Uber, and elsewhere. This “Waymo Diaspora” signifies a maturation of the talent pool, where proven leaders are now applying their skills to solve different, and in some ways more commercially tractable, problems in controlled environments like construction sites.

This deep experience is what attracted investors, including former Waymo CEO John Krafcik, who invested an undisclosed amount in the startup.

“Boris has assembled an extraordinary founding team, many of whom I had the privilege of working with,” Krafcik said in a statement. “It’s an exceptional group with the technical depth, grit and vision to make autonomous construction machines real.”

Investors praised the team’s rapid progress. Aidan Madigan-Curtis, a partner at Eclipse, noted the company’s velocity. “The company started in May and they already had something working autonomously at their test site by early November. It’s kind of bananas,” she said. Madigan-Curtis added, “There are only a small handful of people who can introduce autonomy to a new industry with real credibility — and Boris and the Bedrock Robotics founding team are those people.”

Alex Kolicich, Founding Partner at 8VC, framed the investment in the context of national priorities.

“At a time when rebuilding America is front and center, Bedrock Robotics’ automation platform is poised to be the workhorse of the new American economy — boosting productivity, driving resilience, and raising wages where it matters most,” Kolicich said.

The technology: Automating the excavator

Bedrock Robotics is not aiming to manufacture its own line of yellow iron. Instead, the company has adopted a more agile and capital-efficient strategy by developing a retrofit automation system called the “Bedrock Operator”. This approach avoids direct competition with established heavy equipment manufacturers like Caterpillar and John Deere, focusing instead on making their existing machines more intelligent.

The Bedrock Operator is a package of hardware and software—including cameras, lidar sensors, and computers running advanced AI—that can be installed on existing construction equipment, with an initial focus on excavators. The system is designed to give machines “expert capabilities,” allowing them to perform repetitive and labor-intensive tasks with high precision around the clock.

Key functionalities of the technology include:

24/7 operation: The system enables machines to operate continuously, including overnight or in blistering heat, conditions that limit or prevent human operation. This allows contractors to dramatically increase the utilization of their expensive capital equipment.⁵

Precision and data verification: The use of lidar, a laser-based sensor that creates detailed 3D maps, is central to Bedrock’s system. On a construction site, its value extends beyond the typical navigation and safety functions seen in autonomous cars. Lidar is used to precisely map ground conditions and, critically, to “precisely measure how many cubic yards of dirt are removed with each scoop of the excavator,” according to the company. This transforms the machine from a simple tool into a real-time data collection and verification device, providing project managers with auditable proof of progress.

Augmenting human crews: The company is careful to frame its technology as a tool to augment, not eliminate, human workers. “We’re not instantly going from people to no people. I don’t think anybody thinks that’s a reality of what could happen,” Sofman said. The vision is for autonomous machines to handle boring and repetitive site preparation tasks, such as loading dump trucks, freeing up skilled human workers to focus on more complex and higher-value work like installing pipes or finishing tasks.

Bedrock’s path to market is already underway. The company is actively testing its systems at its own sites in Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas. It plans to expand testing to its first customer work site next month, with a goal of achieving its “first operator-out form”—fully autonomous commercial deployment without a human in the cab for safety—in 2026.

The macro-economic tailwinds: A perfect storm for automation

The intense investor interest in Bedrock Robotics is fueled by a powerful convergence of economic forces creating an urgent need for automation in the construction sector. The industry is facing a severe labor crisis at the exact moment demand is surging.

According to the Associated Builders and Contractors trade association, the industry has a shortfall of workers to replace the approximately 500,000 people who are retiring or leaving the field each year. A separate press release highlights the severity of the issue, citing a “painful shortage of 500,000 construction workers” and noting that 40% of the current construction workforce is expected to retire within the next decade.

This labor crunch is colliding with a historic boom in construction demand, driven by a national push to re-industrialize the U.S. economy. Demand is soaring for new housing, massive data centers to power the AI revolution, and new manufacturing facilities.

In 2024 alone, investment in U.S. manufacturing facilities reached a record $238 billion. This dynamic is a direct consequence of recent industrial policies, such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which are funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into domestic projects.

Bedrock’s CEO Boris Sofman summarized the unique market conditions. “It’s this fascinating situation where you have an astronomical macroeconomic tail and a need to re-industrialize the U.S.,” Sofman told Forbes. “At the same time, the labor pool, even more aggressively than what we saw in trucking, is going the opposite direction.”

This environment reframes the value of automation. It is not simply a tool for incremental cost savings by replacing labor; it is a solution for a fundamental lack of capacity. For contractors, the inability to find skilled operators means turning down profitable work. Automation, by enabling machines to work more hours per day, effectively expands a contractor’s capacity, allowing them to take on more projects and grow revenue.

This perspective is shared by Bedrock’s industry partners. The company is collaborating closely with Sundt Construction, a Phoenix-based general contractor, on field testing and product development. Eric Cylwik, a director at Sundt, said the technology could enable more overnight work and support crews at remote job sites, “where we can’t get enough operators for the equipment we want to deploy”.

Cylwik validated Bedrock’s strategy and expertise, stating, “From our earliest conversations with Bedrock, it was clear they had a strong grasp on the challenges we were trying to solve with robotics. Their thoughtful approach to safety and deployment made it an easy decision to partner and pilot their system on our projects”.

A crowded field: The competitive landscape heats up

Bedrock Robotics is not entering a vacuum. The race to automate construction and mining is intensifying, a fact underscored by major M&A activity in the sector just 24 hours before Bedrock’s announcement.

On July 15,, Pronto.ai, a developer of autonomous haulage systems (AHS) for mining and quarrying, announced it had completed its acquisition of competitor SafeAI. The deal creates a formidable rival for Bedrock. The combined entity, led by autonomous vehicle pioneer Anthony Levandowski, now offers a tiered product portfolio that includes Pronto’s commercially proven, camera-only system and SafeAI’s premium, multi-sensor offering that utilizes lidar and radar.

The acquisition also brings SafeAI’s safety framework, which is certified to ASIL D, the highest functional safety integrity level in the automotive industry, under Pronto’s umbrella.

Beyond this newly consolidated competitor, Bedrock also faces an established incumbent in Built Robotics. Founded in 2016, Built Robotics has a significant head start, having raised $112 million in funding and deployed its technology on commercial job sites across the U.S. and internationally. Like Bedrock, Built focuses on a retrofit model, its “Exosystem,” which uses an AI guidance system to automate existing equipment from various manufacturers. The company has already secured partnerships with major contractors like Mortenson.

The following table provides a comparative analysis of the leading players in the autonomous construction and off-road vehicle market.

The multi-billion dollar opportunity and the road ahead

The market that Bedrock and its competitors are chasing is substantial. The global construction robots market was estimated at $1.37 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18% to reach $3.66 billion by 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research. This is part of a much larger trend toward automation and intelligence in the built world, with the building automation systems market valued at over $80 billion in 2024.

Bedrock’s $80 million in funding will be used to grow its engineering, operations, and commercialization teams to capture a piece of this market. The company’s immediate priorities are to successfully execute its first pilot on a customer job site and continue developing its technology toward the 2026 target for fully autonomous commercial deployment.

However, the road ahead presents significant challenges.

First is the execution risk. Despite the founding team’s world-class pedigree in robotics, transitioning from controlled test environments to the chaotic, unpredictable, and often hazardous conditions of a live construction site is a monumental engineering feat that requires flawless reliability and safety.

Second, the construction industry is notoriously conservative and slow to adopt new technologies. To overcome this inertia, Bedrock must demonstrate a clear, compelling, and rapid return on investment for its customers. The company’s close partnership with an established industry player like Sundt is a critical strategy to build credibility and ensure its product meets real-world needs.

Finally, the competitive pressure is intense and immediate. With well-funded rivals like Pronto.ai and Built Robotics already in the market, speed and the ability to secure flagship customer accounts will be paramount for long-term success.

The emergence of Bedrock Robotics, backed by premier talent and capital, at the very moment the market is beginning to consolidate, marks a clear inflection point. The race is no longer about proving that a construction machine can be automated. It is about scaling that technology into a reliable, profitable, and indispensable tool that will reshape how the world is built.