The Waymo engineers team, leader in Autonomous Robotics Taxis, is considering another major market to automate: construction equipment.
Last year, Boris Sofman, exingenero star of Waymo, leading company in Robotaxis, where he worked in truck automation, associated with his former Waymo colleagues, Ajay Gummalla and Kevin Peterson, and with engineer Tom Eliaz, to found Bedrock Robotics. They started with excavators, the omnipresent machines that perform the heavy excavations. The Startup, based in San Francisco, does not design its own line of construction machinery, but plans to modify existing equipment with cameras, lidar, computers and artificial intelligence software that allows them to work 24 hours a day, even with scorching heat, when human workers would need regular breaks.
Bedrock, who also incorporated the former executive vice president of Uber Freight, Laurent Hautefeuille, as operations director, is leaving his hiding place with 80 million dollars in new financing and plans to start commercial operations in 2026.
“It is another of those transport spaces that deserves a wave of what is happening in transport.”
Waymo’s success with Robotaxis shows that “technology is adequate, and we are seeing it work in one of the most complex applications in the world,” Sofman told Forbes. “That is precisely the type of fundamental element that drives change. By adding all the ways in which we use these specialized heavy machines, it is another of those transport spaces that is called to experience a wave of what is happening in the sector.”
It is a complicated moment for the huge American construction industry. There is a huge demand for new homes, data centers and factories, but the Trump administration tariffs and their aggressive immigration repression are shooting the costs of the materials and aggravating the already scarce offer of qualified workers.
“It is a fascinating situation with a macroeconomic collapse and the need to reindustrialize the United States,” said Sofman. “At the same time, labor, even more aggressively than in the road transport sector, is going in the opposite direction.”
It has not yet announced income objectives, but the market is important. Infrastructure improvements, promoted by the approval of the Biden Infrastructure Bipartisan Law, together with a greater demand for new stores, data centers and factories, will probably boost revenues from excavator contracts in the US. Bedrock has not yet published an assessment, but it is likely to collect additional financing within one year.
The autonomous excavator tests are underway at the Bedrock facilities in Arizona, Texas and Arkansas, and the company plans to expand the tests to the workplace of a client next month. If everything goes well, “we hope to receive the first operator form in 2026,” said executive director Sofman, who has a robotics doctorate from the Carnegie Mellon University.
“Boris has gathered an extraordinary founding team, with many of whom I had the privilege of working,” said former Waymo Executive Director John Krafcik, who has invested an unveiled amount in the startup. “It is an exceptional group with the technical depth, the determination and vision necessary to realize autonomous construction machines.”
Unlike Waymo or the Autonomous Truck developer Aurora, the capital needs of the startup are much lower, since it does not build or buy vehicle fleets or a large factory. In addition, working in private commercial works means that Bedrock does not have to deal with the regulatory challenges of operating robotaxis and robotic semi -trailers on public roads. The speed is not a factor, since the works operate at a human rhythm. Sofman estimates that projects could reduce their general costs at least 20 %, but even more important, they could be completed faster than those who use only human workers.
Labor shortage
There is already a labor deficit to replace the approximately 500,000 people who reach the age of the year or retire, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors commercial association. At the same time, the 25% tariff imposed by Trump to the imported steel and aluminum and its threat of increasing the Canadian wood tariff to 35% are increasing the costs in all areas.
We are not going from suddenly to have people not to have it. I don’t think anyone thinks that is a reality of what could happen.
The total impact of the current immigration repression is not yet clear, although 34% of construction workers in 2023 were born abroad, almost double 18% among all workers, according to Ken Simonson, chief economist of the General Association of Contractors of the United States (AGCA), citing data from the US census. Even so, the proportion of immigrant workers is lower in qualified offices that require certification, such as excavators’ operation, he added.
Given the scarcity, technology is not likely to eliminate jobs, but allow human teams to do everything more efficiently, said Eric Cylwik, director of innovation at Sundt Construction, a company based in Arizona that is helping Bedrock to develop and try its technology, along with Zachry Construction, with Texas headquarters, and Champion Site Prep.
“We are not going to immediately have staff not to have it. I don’t think anyone thinks that is a reality,” he said. On the other hand, Bedrock technology will allow its competitors to perform tasks as more night work, where robotic excavators could complete boring and repetitive tasks of site preparation, such as loading turning trucks with land, and allowing human workers to concentrate on tasks such as the installation of pipes. I could also help crews in remote work sites, “where we can’t get enough operators for the team we want to deploy,” said Cylwik.
Bedrock has not revealed how much it will charge for equipping complex excavating machines, such as those that cost $ 500,000 new, although its ability to modify existing equipment with autonomous capabilities is extremely attractive to companies such as SUNDT. “It is an advantage because it works throughout our fleet and can be done due to a fraction of the cost of buying a new excavator,” said Cylwik.
The laser lidar, capable of creating 3D images of the world instantly, even at high speeds, is essential for safe road driving. In a work, you can map the conditions of the land in detail and measure precisely how many cubic meters of land are extracted with each excavator pass, essential information for contractors.
For some projects, “we need a collegiate refraintor to come to quantify the amount of land we move every time we request a payment,” said Cylwik. “With a system like this, we can report accurately how much land each team moved,” which affects the speed with which Sundt receives the payment. “Being able to analyze so much information so quickly has a deep impact on the construction sector.”
The speed with which Bedrock has gone from the concept to the evidence and the planned marketing was what attracted the capitalist capital firm Eclipse, which led its seed capital round in May 2024. Series A current was led by 8VC. Other investors are Two Sigma Ventures, Equity Partners Value, Nvidia Nventures, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Raine Group, Tishman Speyer, Domerides Management, to Rajhi Partners and Samsara Ventures.
“It’s a real wonder,” said Aidan Madigan-Curtis, a partner of Eclipse. “The company started in May (from 2024) already early November already had a system running autonomously at its test site. It is a pass. Now they are performing totally autonomous excavations without human operator in their test site, and they will do so at the facilities of a client next month.”
We do not compete with Caterpillar or try to make machines. We seek to make them smarter.
They have also focused on an industry with little or no initial competition. Leading teams such as Caterpillar and John Deere are entering automation with trucks and robotic mining tractors, but have not focused on equipment such as excavators, wheel loaders and dump trucks, vital for commercial construction. Before Bedrock, “there was no opportunity to try construction equipment (automated),” said Cylwik.
Asking why Caterpillar and Deere have not created competitive robotic solutions for construction is like asking why BMW did not create Waymo, Sofman said. «The mechanics of what they have designed is magical. They are incredible machines, and the fact that they work with such reliability and precision in such difficult environments is wonderful, but it is a different DNA than it takes to form an automatic learning team ».
Instead, he hopes Bedrock will be associated with those companies.
“We do not compete with Caterpillar or try to make machines. We seek that the machines are smarter,” he said. “It becomes a very complementary element to the entire ecosystem, where Caterpillar and Deere machines become smarter, general contractors and subcontractors can do much more work, more productively and with a greater margin of benefit, and the whole society benefits because more work is done and prices become much more affordable.”
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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