Boris Sofman spent a decade at Waymo making cars drive themselves. Now he is doing the same for 50-ton excavators.
His company, Bedrock Robotics, just raised $270 million in Series B funding. The round was co-led by CapitalG and Valor Atreides AI Fund, with Nvidia's venture arm, MIT, and Tishman Speyer among the participants. Total funding: $350 million since the company emerged from stealth in July 2025.
The valuation hit $1.75 billion.
Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment — excavators, bulldozers, loaders — with sensors, compute, and autonomy software. The kit installs in hours. The machine then operates without a human in the cab.
Waymo DNA on the job site
The founding team came from Waymo's autonomous driving program. Sofman led the trucking application. Kevin Peterson (CTO) and Ajay Gummalla (VP Engineering) helped build the systems that put driverless cars on San Francisco streets. They brought the same ML-first approach to heavy machinery.
Construction is a harder environment. Mud, dust, grade changes, 20-ton loads swinging within inches of workers. But the core problem is the same: a machine perceiving the world and acting on it in real time.
The approach works. The company already has machines operating across California, Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas. On a 130-acre manufacturing site, its autonomous excavators moved 65,000 cubic yards of earth without an operator touching the controls.
Sundt Construction and Champion Site Prep are using the system in production.
The numbers behind the round
Construction robotics crossed from pilot to production in 2025. Venture funding hit $1.36 billion in the first three quarters alone — more than double 2024's total, according to the Zacua Ventures / Hilti / 94V report. Heavy-equipment autonomy deals averaged $98 million per round.
The company sits at the center of that wave. Its investors include Alphabet's CapitalG, Nvidia, and 8VC. The roster signals that the market sees construction autonomy as an infrastructure bet, not a niche robotics play.
The demand side is straightforward. The US construction industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone. Project backlogs stretched past eight months as of December 2025. Labor is not coming back — the workforce is shrinking while infrastructure demand surges.
What Bedrock actually built
The product is called the Bedrock Operator. It is a sensor-and-compute suite retrofitted onto existing machines. No new equipment purchase. No months-long integration.
The system handles digging, loading, and grading autonomously. A supervisor oversees multiple machines from a tablet. One person can manage a fleet that previously required ten operators across three shifts.
The unit economics work because the hardware is modular and the software improves with every hour of operation. The system claims centimeter-level precision across all tasks. On a jobsite in Texas, the system ran ten hours straight — through dust, heat, and grade changes — without a single intervention.
What comes next
Bedrock is targeting full operator-less deployment later this year. That means excavators working without any human in the cab and without a supervisor watching from the edge of the site. The safety case rests on 360-degree sensing and layered collision avoidance — the same architecture that made Waymo's driverless cars safe enough to cross 200 million miles without a fatality.
The market is global construction, a $13 trillion industry that has barely begun to automate. If Bedrock delivers on its timeline, the company will be the first to put fully autonomous heavy equipment into production at scale.
McKinsey estimates that $106 trillion in infrastructure investment is needed by 2040. Bedrock's bet is that those projects will be built by machines that do not sleep.