Bedrock Robotics closed a $270 million Series B funding round in early 2026, pushing its total funding past $350 million and its valuation to $1.75 billion. Backers include CapitalG, the Valor Atreides AI Fund, NVIDIA’s venture arm, and MIT, among others.
For years, the construction industry struggled with a growing labor shortage and aging workforce. As a result, many investors saw automation as too complex and too risky. But with this latest funding, Bedrock’s approach has attracted serious capital and serious attention.
How Bedrock Turns Existing Heavy Equipment Into Autonomous Machines
Most robotics companies solve the labor problem by selling contractors brand-new machines. Bedrock, however, takes a different approach entirely. Rather than requiring new equipment, the company works directly with general contractors to retrofit existing heavy machinery, including excavators, bulldozers, and loaders, with autonomous capabilities.
To make this possible, Bedrock built its core product, the Bedrock Operator. The system uses lidar, GPS, and motion sensors to help machines navigate and perform work without a human operator. Better still, it mounts to equipment in just a few hours, with no downtime or permanent modifications required.
That kind of flexibility matters greatly to contractors, who simply cannot afford to pull machines off active sites for extended periods.
The Waymo Background That Makes Bedrock’s Team Stand Out
Beyond the product itself, Bedrock’s founding team brings strong credibility to a space that has historically seen more hype than results. The company’s founders previously led programs at Waymo, helping pioneer the systems that made fully autonomous vehicles a reality on public roads.
That background gives the team a clear head start. After all, construction sites demand the same kind of fast decision-making in unpredictable conditions that public roads do.
As a result, Bedrock built its system to combine perception, planning, control, and safety into one platform designed specifically for environments where uneven terrain and tight safety margins make automation especially difficult.
Construction Needs 800,000 More Workers
Meanwhile, the scale of the industry’s workforce challenge continues to grow. The construction sector needs nearly 800,000 additional workers over the next two years just to keep pace with demand. Project backlogs already climbed to eight months as of late 2025, and retirements continue to widen the gap further.
On top of that, contractors now face rising demand for infrastructure, factories, and data centers on one side and a shrinking workforce on the other. As CEO Boris Sofman put it, the construction industry is being asked to build more than it can deliver. Bedrock argues autonomous equipment is the most practical answer the industry has right now.
Autonomous Equipment Is Already Running on Live Job Sites
In late 2025, Bedrock completed a large-scale deployment on a 130-acre manufacturing site, partnering with Tempe, Arizona-based Sundt Construction on a mass excavation project. The work proved that autonomous heavy machinery can perform reliably in real conditions, not just controlled environments.
Looking ahead, the company targets its first fully operator-less excavator deployments with customers in 2026. Beyond individual machines, Bedrock also plans to coordinate entire equipment fleets autonomously across a single site.
The broader market is clearly moving in the same direction. Last summer, construction robotics software firm FieldAI raised $405 million, signaling that investor appetite for autonomous construction technology extends well beyond just one company.
