Waymo Veterans Launch Bedrock Robotics with $80M

Before launching Bedrock Robotics, CEO Boris Sofman spent years working on autonomous trucking at Waymo and helped lead the first fully driverless vehicles onto public roads. Now, alongside fellow Waymo veterans Kevin Peterson and Ajay Gummalla, and former Segment engineering leader Tom Eliaz, he’s building a system that brings advanced autonomy to construction equipment: starting with excavators.

“Construction is one of the largest industries in our country, it affects the cost of pretty much everything,” Sofman said in an interview. “There’s so many things that are broken with infrastructure and with our buildings. There’s so many things that cost so much more than they should.”

Bedrock Robotics emerged from stealth this week with $80 million in funding led by Eclipse and 8VC. The company retrofits standard construction vehicles with cameras, lidar, compute, and software that enable the machines to operate autonomously. Rather than replacing fleets, Bedrock is designed to work with what contractors already have. “We're not competing with Caterpillar and trying to make machines. We're trying to make machines more intelligent,” Sofman said in a statement to Forbes.

Applying ML to Dirt

Sofman draws a direct line between his work at Waymo and the challenges of construction automation. “Excavators, bulldozers, and loaders must understand site terrain, adapt to changing conditions, and execute intricate maneuvers with tons of steel,” he wrote in a company blog post. “The difference is these machines don’t just navigate the world, they sculpt it with centimeter-level precision.”