Bedrock Robotics raises $600 million to advance autonomous excavators

A major round for a two-year-old startup

Bedrock Robotics, a startup in autonomous vehicle technology, has raised $600 million in a Series C round that valued the company at $4.1 billion. The round was co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, TechCrunch reports. For a company founded in 2024, this is rapid growth: it has raised nearly $1 billion in total since its founding. New investors include US Innovative Technology Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners and Temasek, while existing investors include 8VC, Georgian, Valor Equity Partners, Xora, Eclipse, Perry Creek Capital and Nvidia.

From pilots to commercial operation

The round came two months after a key milestone: Bedrock's autonomous excavators moved beyond tests and pilot programs and began operating on active construction sites. The company has developed an autonomous driving kit that can be retrofitted onto construction and other heavy equipment. Machines equipped with Bedrock's technology are already in commercial use at a water treatment facility in Nevada, at an earthworks site run by Champion Site Prep in Texas, and on a civil project of 1.2 million cubic yards with Zachry Construction Corporation. A new partner is Haydon, a general contractor from Arizona, which plans to use Bedrock-equipped machines on projects in advanced manufacturing, water infrastructure, data centers and medical facilities.

Team and plans

Bedrock was founded in 2024 by veterans of the autonomous driving and robotics industries. Co-founder and CEO Boris Sofman previously led Waymo's discontinued trucking program, and before that founded Anki Robotics, the maker of the consumer robot Cozmo, which shut down in 2019. Other co-founders include Waymo veterans Kevin Peterson (CTO) and Ajay Gummalla (VP of engineering and infrastructure), as well as Tom Eliaz, who previously worked at Segment and Twilio. The fresh capital will go toward accelerating the transition to commercial operations: the company intends to deploy its technology on more construction sites and expand customer support teams and infrastructure. “We have proven that fully autonomous excavators can perform real, useful work as part of existing crews and workflows on job sites. The next challenge is delivering this capability to more contractors as a reliable part of how projects get built,” said Sofman. The company also announced two appointments: Amy Jones Satrom (formerly of Amazon, Nuro, Uber) has become VP of operations, and Lando Juarez, who previously led Uber's legal work in autonomous mobility and delivery, has become general counsel.

Betting on a labor shortage

Bedrock is focused specifically on autonomous excavators, in part because of a growing shortage of skilled operators: according to the company, learning to operate an excavator takes five years or more, and more and more construction workers are approaching retirement age. According to an estimate by the industry association Associated Builders and Contractors, more than 40% of construction industry workers will retire within the next five years. Bedrock expects the industry to increasingly turn to autonomous technologies to close the labor gap. The bet looks justified based on the facts presented: the company has already moved its machines from pilots to commercial operation at three sites and secured a major round two months after that transition, which points to investor interest specifically in the scaling stage. However, the sources do not disclose details of contracts or the company's revenue, so the technology's economic efficiency remains outside the scope of confirmed data.