Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco startup that retrofits heavy construction equipment to run without an operator, raised $600 million in a Series C round that values the company at $4.1 billion after the investment, the company said Monday.
CapitalG and Emergence Capital co-led the round. New investors included the US Innovative Technology Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners and Temasek, and existing backers 8VC, Georgian, Valor Equity Partners, Xora, Eclipse, Perry Creek Capital and Nvidia also participated. The round brings Bedrock’s total funding to nearly $1 billion since it was founded in 2024.
From pilots to paid work
The raise follows what Bedrock described as a turning point in mid-August, when its fully autonomous excavators began doing paid work on live commercial job sites. Its retrofitted machines are operating at a water treatment facility in Nevada, an earthwork site in Texas and a large civil sitework project with Zachry Construction, according to the company.
Bedrock said it has more than doubled its customer base since 2025. Its newest partner is Haydon, an employee-owned general contractor based in Tempe, Ariz., which is using the technology for autonomous earthwork on a remote Texas site and plans to expand to projects including data centers, water plants and advanced manufacturing facilities. Other new customers include C.W. Matthews in Georgia, Smith Trucking in Florida, B&S Site Development in Virginia, Wagner Construction in Minnesota, Native Excavating in Colorado, Clarkson Construction in Missouri and selected ArchKey Solutions projects in Arkansas.
A labor-shortage thesis
Investors are betting on a persistent shortage of skilled equipment operators. Bedrock cited estimates that employers will need to fill about 1.7 million skilled trades openings a year through 2035, and the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group has estimated that more than 40% of construction workers will retire within five years. The company said it takes five years or more to master running an excavator.
The size of the round also reflects how much capital investors are willing to commit to so-called physical AI, where software is paired with machines operating in the real world. Bedrock is led by Chief Executive Boris Sofman, who previously ran Waymo’s self-driving truck program, and a founding team drawn largely from Waymo.
Use of funds
Bedrock plans to use the money to expand deployments with more contractors and to build out the field operations, commercial teams and support infrastructure needed to keep autonomous machines running on customer sites. It also hired Amy Jones Satrom, a veteran of Amazon, Nuro and Uber, as vice president of operations, and Lando Juarez, who led legal work for Uber’s autonomous mobility and delivery business, as general counsel.
The company said it will move into new machine types and tasks, including trenching and larger excavator models, as its partnerships expand.
