Bedrock Robotics, the Waymo-founded startup that raised $270M this year to automate heavy equipment, said its retrofit system is now running excavators fully autonomously on active U.S. commercial jobsites — the first time a hydraulic excavator has done a full shift on paying customer work without an operator in the cab.
Where the machines are digging
The company announced three initial deployments on August 17, 2026: a Nevada water-treatment facility with Sundt Construction, a multi-million cubic-yard earthwork site with Champion Site Prep in Texas, and a 1.2 million cubic-yard civil sitework project with Zachry Construction Corporation. All three run Bedrock's Operator kit — a bolt-on sensor and compute suite installed in a single day that does not modify the base machine.
How the Operator works
The end-to-end machine-learning model handles perception, motion planning and task execution once a site manager sets the initial plan. A 360-degree sensor layout gives the machine no blind spots, and the excavator stops automatically if a person or unauthorized object enters its work envelope. Bedrock has been running the system under human supervision for a year across 15 general-contractor partners in 23 states.
Why excavators first
Excavators are typically 25% of a contractor's fleet and take five years to master, making them the hardest heavy-equipment role to staff. With more than 40% of the construction workforce projected to retire this decade — and large projects already averaging 20% over schedule — CEO and co-founder Boris Sofman says operator-out fleets are the fastest lever to lift industry output. Dump trucks, dozers and loaders will follow.
The Waymo pedigree
Bedrock's co-founders and much of its early team came from Waymo, where they helped scale the world's most mature autonomous-driving fleet. The company has raised $350M to date from CapitalG, Atreides, 8VC, Eclipse, Emergence, Perry Creek, NVIDIA's NVentures, Tishman Speyer, MIT, Georgian and others. Its February $270M Series B was one of the largest construction-robotics rounds ever, and this month's operator-out milestone lands alongside FORT Robotics' SPAC merger as a marker that physical-AI systems are moving from pilot to production.
Reporting based on coverage from Bedrock Robotics, GlobeNewswire and Construction Dive.