Summary
Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, which retrofits heavy construction machinery with autonomous systems. He previously spent nearly five years at Waymo as an engineering executive leading autonomous trucking, and before that co-founded consumer robotics company Anki, which shipped over 3.7 million devices including the Cozmo and Vector robots.
Career
Sofman earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. While his exact graduation year and undergraduate background have not been publicly confirmed, his doctoral work at CMU positioned him within the robotics community during the era of the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge autonomous-vehicle competitions, though he has said in interviews that he took a different path from many of his classmates who went directly into self-driving startups (Automate.org).
Instead, Sofman co-founded Anki, a San Francisco consumer robotics company, where he served as CEO for roughly a decade. Anki first gained attention at Apple’s 2013 WWDC keynote with Drive, an iPhone-controlled racing car product, later releasing Overdrive and a Fast & Furious-branded version. The company’s best-known product was Cozmo, a $200 desktop robot designed to push the state of the art in consumer robotics and AI, followed by Vector, a smart-home robot. Anki shipped over 3.7 million devices globally and reached roughly $100 million in annual revenue before shutting down in 2019. Sofman has cited lessons from Anki — including challenges specific to the toy industry’s extreme seasonality — as formative experiences he carried forward into later ventures (Automate.org; LinkedIn).
After Anki, Sofman joined Waymo, where he spent just under five years as an engineering executive, the last three and a half of which he served as Senior Director of Engineering, Head of Trucking. In that role, he led Waymo’s autonomous trucking application and key core technologies during the company’s push to launch fully driverless ride-hailing at scale; Waymo’s robo-taxis have logged over 100 million driverless miles. Sofman left Waymo in March 2024 to co-found Bedrock Robotics alongside Waymo colleagues Kevin Peterson and Ajay Gummalla, and Tom Eliaz from Segment/Twilio, with the goal of applying the modern machine-learning approaches proven in autonomous vehicles to construction equipment — an industry Sofman has described as impossible to automate without those breakthroughs (LinkedIn; Fast Company).
At Bedrock, Sofman has emphasized the company’s ability to deploy a working product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, while growing revenues and serving real customers from the outset. He has publicly stated the company is working toward its first fully operator-out, unsupervised excavator deployments in 2026, marking a key technical and regulatory milestone for autonomous construction equipment (TechCrunch blog post).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Sofman’s LinkedIn, an Automate.org interview covering his career path from Anki through Waymo to Bedrock, his TechCrunch author page, Fast Company’s coverage of Bedrock’s launch, and Bedrock Robotics’ own company website. Some biographical details, including the exact timeline of his early academic and Anki-era work, are drawn from his own public statements and have not been independently corroborated beyond contemporaneous press coverage.