Summary
Bedrock Robotics develops the Bedrock Operator, a retrofit autonomy kit that mounts onto existing heavy construction machinery — primarily 20-to-80-ton excavators, with plans for bulldozers and wheel loaders — to enable supervised and, eventually, fully autonomous earthmoving on construction sites. Founded in 2024 by four Waymo and Anki alumni led by CEO Boris Sofman, the San Francisco company has raised over $350 million and is working with major U.S. general contractors to deploy its systems on active job sites.
Company Story
Bedrock Robotics was founded in May 2024 by Boris Sofman, Kevin Peterson, Ajay Gummalla, and Tom Eliaz, all veterans of Waymo’s autonomous-vehicle program. Sofman, who holds a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, had previously co-founded consumer robotics company Anki — maker of the Cozmo robot — before spending nearly five years at Waymo as an engineering executive leading autonomous trucking and core perception technologies. Peterson, Gummalla, and Eliaz (the latter of whom came from Segment/Twilio rather than Waymo) joined Sofman to apply the machine-learning-driven autonomy approaches that had proven successful in self-driving cars to the labor-constrained construction industry (TechCrunch; Automate.org).
The company worked in stealth for over a year before emerging publicly in July 2025 with $80 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Eclipse and 8VC, disclosing that it had already begun testing its Bedrock Operator retrofit kit with four construction partners — Sundt Construction, Zachry Construction Corporation, Champion Site Prep, and Capitol Aggregates — across California, Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas. In November 2025, Bedrock completed a large-scale supervised-autonomy deployment on a 130-acre manufacturing site, moving more than 65,000 cubic yards of material autonomously, and in February 2026 closed a $270 million Series B co-led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from NVIDIA’s NVentures, MIT, and other institutional and corporate investors, at a valuation of approximately $1.75 billion (PR Newswire; The Robot Report).
As of mid-2026, Bedrock’s deployments remain in a supervised-autonomy posture, with human operators overseeing one or several machines remotely. CEO Boris Sofman has stated the company is working toward its first fully operator-out, unsupervised excavator deployments later in 2026, which would mark a significant technical and regulatory milestone for autonomous construction equipment (The Robot Report).
Founders
Boris Sofman co-founded Bedrock Robotics and serves as CEO. He earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and co-founded consumer robotics company Anki, which shipped over 3.7 million devices including the Cozmo and Vector robots and reached roughly $100 million in annual revenue before shutting down in 2019. He then spent nearly five years at Waymo as Senior Director of Engineering, leading the company’s autonomous trucking program and core perception technologies. At Bedrock, he has described the company’s opportunity as applying the modern machine-learning approaches he helped deploy in autonomous transportation to construction, an industry that he believes could not have been automated without those breakthroughs (Automate.org; Bedrock Robotics).
Kevin Peterson co-founded Bedrock Robotics and serves as CTO, leading core autonomy technology development. He is a Waymo veteran who worked alongside Sofman during Waymo’s push to launch autonomous ride-hailing at scale, contributing to systems that logged over 100 million driverless miles. At Bedrock, he has emphasized the team’s strategy of tackling the hardest technical problems first — starting with excavators, which he and co-founder Ajay Gummalla have described as among the most complex machines to automate (Eclipse; Bedrock Robotics).
Ajay Gummalla and Tom Eliaz are co-founders and Vice Presidents of Engineering at Bedrock. Gummalla, another Waymo alumnus, leads hardware and autonomy platform engineering, while Eliaz, who previously worked at Segment through its $3.2 billion acquisition by Twilio, leads engineering execution (Bedrock Robotics; C4 Ventures).
Products
Bedrock’s core product is the Bedrock Operator, a sensor-and-compute retrofit kit that mounts on the cab of 20-to-80-ton excavators from manufacturers including Caterpillar, John Deere, and Komatsu. Installation takes a few hours and requires no permanent modification to the host machine, allowing contractors to return equipment to human operation or resell it without issue. The kit includes lidar units, dual GPS, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), eight high-definition cameras, and an in-cab computer running on NVIDIA Jetson hardware with TensorRT, executing perception and control algorithms written in Python, Rust, and C#, with ONNX for model interchange and Simulink for controls work (YesPress; Robots in Construction).
The system currently operates in supervised-autonomy mode across six earthmoving subtasks: mass excavation, trenching, rough grading, backfilling, finish grading, and soil hauling. A human operator oversees one or multiple machines remotely, intervening when the model encounters edge cases and accumulating structured training data to improve subsequent deployments. The excavator autonomously executes dig-and-load cycles, filling human-operated articulated dump trucks within a geofenced work zone, while human drivers continue to manage haul trucks and site logistics. Bedrock has said it is working toward fully operator-out deployments later in 2026, which would remove the human-oversight requirement and represent a shift to unsupervised autonomy (Robots in Construction; The Robot Report).
The company’s stated long-term vision includes expanding the Bedrock Operator to bulldozers and wheel loaders, and eventually developing foundation models that can control many types of construction machinery, though current documented deployments remain focused on excavators for earthmoving (Bedrock Robotics blog).
Funding
Bedrock Robotics has raised over $350 million since its 2024 founding. It emerged from stealth in July 2025 with $80 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Eclipse and 8VC, and in February 2026 closed a $270 million Series B co-led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity fund) and the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from Xora, 8VC, Eclipse, Emergence Capital, Perry Creek Capital, NVIDIA’s corporate venture arm NVentures, Tishman Speyer, MIT, Georgian, Incharge Capital, C4 Ventures, and others, at a valuation of approximately $1.75 billion (TechCrunch; PR Newswire).
Partnerships
Bedrock is deploying its Bedrock Operator with four named early construction partners: Sundt Construction, Zachry Construction Corporation, Champion Site Prep, and Capitol Aggregates. The company describes these relationships as co-development efforts, working alongside general contractors to refine the technology for real-world job-site conditions. Its November 2025 deployment — a 130-acre mass excavation project that moved over 65,000 cubic yards of dirt — was publicly documented as its first large-scale supervised-autonomy engagement, though the specific customer was not named in press coverage (TechCrunch; Robots in Construction).
Timeline
- May 2024: Boris Sofman, Kevin Peterson, Ajay Gummalla, and Tom Eliaz found Bedrock Robotics.
- July 2025: Bedrock emerges from stealth with $80 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Eclipse and 8VC.
- November 2025: Bedrock completes a large-scale supervised-autonomy deployment on a 130-acre site, moving over 65,000 cubic yards of material.
- February 2026: Bedrock closes a $270 million Series B at a roughly $1.75 billion valuation.
- 2026 (ongoing): Bedrock targets its first fully operator-out, unsupervised excavator deployments later in the year.
Market Context
Bedrock competes in the fast-growing field of construction automation and autonomy, where it is differentiated by its retrofit-kit approach — mounting autonomy systems onto existing excavators, bulldozers, and loaders rather than building purpose-built autonomous machines from scratch. This positions it alongside other retrofit or software-first construction-robotics players, and in contrast to OEMs like Caterpillar and Komatsu that have their own semi-autonomous and tele-operated equipment lines. Broader competitive context includes Built Robotics (also focused on autonomous earthmoving, though with a different technical and business model) and emerging startups applying AI and robotics to other construction tasks such as masonry, concrete finishing, and inspection. Bedrock’s founding team’s deep Waymo pedigree — and the company’s explicit framing of construction autonomy as the next application of proven self-driving-car technology — has helped it attract unusually large venture backing for an early-stage construction-tech startup, though widespread contractor adoption of fully unsupervised autonomous heavy machinery remains unproven in the market.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Bedrock Robotics’ own website and blog, TechCrunch’s July 2025 launch coverage, PR Newswire and The Robot Report’s coverage of the company’s February 2026 Series B, third-party technical documentation from Robots in Construction and YesPress, investor profiles from Eclipse and CapitalG, and a long-form Automate.org interview with CEO Boris Sofman on his career path from Anki through Waymo to Bedrock. Because Bedrock is an early-stage private company that has not disclosed revenue or the specific number of machines in active deployment, claims about commercial scale and traction in this profile should be treated as company-reported rather than independently verified, and re-checked against more recent company statements for anything time-sensitive.