Forklift certified: Bedrock secures $80M to develop AI equipment operators

Led by a team of ex-Waymo engineers, Bedrock Robotics is developing a new generation of autonomous heavy equipment equipment operators who, they hope, will be able to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without human intervention.

The company “emerged from stealth” last month with news of an $80 million raise on an undisclosed valuation for its autonomous equipment play — but they’re not building heavy equipment themselves. Instead, the company plans to offer upgrades for existing equipment assets that includes a suite of cameras, LiDAR sensors, and AI-powered software that will enable to work at all times, and in conditions that human operators wouldn’t be able to tolerate.

Bedrock’s tech package prototype was developed specifically for excavators, as the most common/versatile piece of construction equipment. And, reportedly, can be installed by technicians and ready for work in just a few hours.

Credible roster

Bedrock’s roster of Waymo veterans includes Boris Sofman, Ajay Gummalla, and engineers Tom Eliaz and Kevin Peterson. Peterson is extra-notable as the former head of perception for Waymo Via and founder of a similar autonomous equipment company called Marble Robot back in 2016, before selling that company to Caterpillar in 2020, as part of the brand’s integration of autonomous drive solutions into its iconic bright yellow construction and quarry products.

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The team is hoping the lessons they learned automating taxis and exiting tech startups will enable them to revolutionize the heavy equipment space, overcome the industry’s endemic labor shortage, and (of course) make everyone involved a buttload of money.

Before that happens, however, the company needs to prove that its tech is actually capable of doing the job as well as human operators. Sofman believes their success in the robotaxi space gives them the sort of credibility investors are looking for, and shows that, “the state of technology just being right, where we’re seeing it work on one of the hardest applications in the world,” he said to Forbes. “That’s exactly the type of building block that catalyzes change. When you tally up all the ways we use these specialized heavy machines, it’s another one of those transportation-style spaces that is due for a wave of what’s happening in transportation.”

Sofman, if nothing else, is a good hype man. When Forbes tees him up, explaining that the construction industry in a “tricky” time, highlighting the Trump Administration’s trade tariffs and aggressive, often illegal immigration crackdowns artificially boosting materials costs, driving inflation, and making an already tight supply of skilled workers even tighter, Sofman is ready to parrot it right back.

“It’s this fascinating situation where you have an astronomical macroeconomic tail and a need to re-industrialize the US,” says Sofman. “At the same time, the labor pool, even more aggressively than what we saw in trucking, is going the opposite direction.”

Bedrock hasn’t yet released revenue targets or pricing, but cite the size of the established market, along with infrastructure upgrades aided by the passage of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure law (which, again, is “tricky” these days), higher demand for new warehouses and data centers as enough to make a business case to investors.

For their parts, they’ve convinced their old boss, ex-Waymo CEO John Krafcik. “Boris has assembled an extraordinary founding team, many of whom I had the privilege of working with,” says Krafcik, who invested an undisclosed amount in the startup. “It’s an exceptional group with the technical depth, grit and vision to make autonomous construction machines real.”

NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia, was also named as an investor.

Electrek’s Take

There’s no question that there are a number of factors making things a bit “tricky” for the construction industry right now, and that — at least until operator wages rise — there’s more work than workers these days, even as both the global and US populations continues to grow. That said, there’s a particular type of corpro-political technobabble hype that I have, thankfully, been able to remain immune to over my many (many) years on planet Earth, and Sofman speaks it with an effortless fluency that makes it hard to tell if he’s said anything at all.

But, crucially, he’s got $80 million and I don’t, so maybe ignore uncle Jojo. In the meantime, try to remember that market size isn’t a business plan, OK? OK.

SOURCES | PHOTOS: Bedrock Robotics, via Equipment World, Forbes.

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