This startup’s self-driving excavators help dig up $600M in new funding

Bedrock Robotics has raised $600 million in a funding round that values the autonomous vehicle technology startup at $4.1 billion, marking a speedy ascent for the two-year-old company.

The Series C round, co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, comes two months after the startup reached a key milestone: moving its autonomous excavators beyond testing and pilot programs and putting them to work on active construction sites.

Bedrock Robotics has developed a self-driving kit that can be retrofitted onto construction and other worksite vehicles. Excavators outfitted with Bedrock’s autonomous-driving tech are now commercially operating at a Nevada-based water treatment facility, an earthwork site run by Champion Site Prep in Texas_, and a 1.2 million-cubic-yard civil sitework project with Zachry Construction Corporation.

Bedrock has raised nearly $1 billion since it was founded in 2024 by a group of autonomous vehicle and robotics industry veterans. Co-founder and CEO Boris Sofman previously led Waymo’s now-shuttered self-driving trucks program. Sofman also co-founded and led Anki Robotics, the maker of the popular Cozmo consumer robot, which shut down in 2019.

Other co-founders include Waymo veterans Kevin Peterson, Bedrock’s chief technology officer, and Ajay Gummalla, who serves as Bedrock’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure. Tom Eliaz, who previously worked at Segment and Twilio, is also a co-founder and VP of engineering and hardware.

The fresh capital will help Bedrock accelerate its transition to commercial work. The company plans to deploy its technology at more construction sites, while expanding the teams and infrastructure needed to support customers in the field.

“We have proven that fully autonomous excavators can perform real work of value alongside the crews and workflows already in place on job sites. The next challenge is delivering that capability to more contractors as a dependable part of how projects get built,” Sofman said in a statement.

Bedrock is particularly focused on autonomous excavators, in part because of a growing shortage of skilled operators. It takes five years or more to master operating an excavator, according to Bedrock. Meanwhile, a growing number of construction workers are approaching retirement age. The Associated Builders and Contractors, a national construction industry trade association, estimates that more than 40% of construction workers will retire in the next five years.

Bedrock is betting that the industry will increasingly turn to autonomous driving tech to help close that labor gap.

The startup’s newest partner is Haydon, an Arizona-based general contractor that plans to use Bedrock-equipped machines across a range of projects, including advanced manufacturing facilities, water and wastewater, data centers, and healthcare facilities.

New investors US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Bessemer Venture Partners, and Temasek participated in the round, alongside existing investors 8VC, Georgian, Valor Equity Partners, Xora, Eclipse, Perry Creek Capital, and Nvidia.

The startup also announced two executive hires as it scales commercial operations. Amy Jones Satrom, a veteran of Amazon, Nuro, and Uber, has joined Bedroc as its vice president of operations. Lando Juarez, formerly head of legal for Uber’s autonomous mobility and delivery business, was hired as general counsel.