SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, Bedrock Robotics announced that excavators equipped with Bedrock’s system are now operating fully autonomously on live customer sites, shifting AI’s frontier from digital intelligence into real-world production.

Just one year after emerging from stealth, Bedrock is performing autonomous excavation on critical U.S. infrastructure, including a Nevada-based water treatment facility in partnership with Sundt Construction, a multi-million cubic yard earthwork site with Champion Site Prep in Texas, and a 1.2M cubic yard civil sitework project with Zachry Construction Corporation.

These deployments mark a significant shift — artificial intelligence is increasingly performing work of genuine economic value in the physical world. It’s also a critical step toward something larger: fleets that can self-orchestrate across machine types to plan, share, and execute jobs on a construction site at a pace and scale the industry has never seen.

The nation’s construction capacity has become a primary strategic bottleneck.

Reindustrialization starts with what gets built. The entire physical backbone of the economy — from manufacturing plants and data centers to energy grids, civil and defense infrastructure — is built upon the construction industry’s output.

However, the sector is reaching its limits. 20% of construction workers are over the age of 551 and estimates indicate over 40% of the construction industry will retire in the next five years2. Large projects already run an average of 20% over schedule and 80% over budget.3 Exacerbating these challenges is the inherent danger of the industry: Construction workers are 7.5% of the workforce and 20% of workplace deaths.4

Ultimately, the success of American reindustrialization is inextricably linked to its ability to build. Autonomous systems offer a path to expand this capacity by multiplying the impact of every crew.

“The physical economy is the next great frontier for machine learning,” stated Boris Sofman, CEO and co-founder of Bedrock Robotics. “While we have excavators moving earth independently today, we are moving toward coordinated fleets that self-orchestrate entire scopes of work. Getting here took real partnership with contractors who are designing these solutions alongside us, and an uncompromising commitment to doing this safely, responsibly, and with optimism about the future. This fundamentally redefines not just the productivity of a single machine, but the very scale of what contractors — and our country — can achieve.”

Mastering the Critical First Phase

Bedrock prioritized excavators, the most complex and highly utilized machine on a job site, often making up 25% of a contractor’s fleet. Mastering an excavator typically takes five years or more, which makes it among the hardest machines to predictably staff with skilled operators. Starting with earthwork brings more predictability to the foundation of every major project. Until earthwork is complete, no subsequent phase — concrete, steel, mechanical, or electrical — can proceed.

The Bedrock Operator retrofits existing fleets with a sophisticated sensor and compute suite in a same-day installation that requires no permanent changes or new machinery. Trained across tens of thousands of hours in the field, Bedrock’s end-to-end machine learning model enables the machine to perceive its environment, plan its motion, and execute complex tasks autonomously once a site manager sets the initial plan.

After a year of rigorous testing on active job sites under human supervision, Bedrock-equipped machines have proven their readiness.

“Our partnership with Bedrock Robotics is helping us tackle some of the challenges that matter most in construction: making schedules and costs more predictable, getting more consistent use out of our equipment, and allowing our skilled crews to focus on the work where their experience matters most,” said Cade Rowley, CEO of Sundt Construction, Inc. “AI is creating opportunities in our industry that we could not have imagined just a few years ago, both in the office and in the field. As an employee-owned company, these tools can help us take on more, perform at a higher level and create even greater opportunities for our people.”

An Uncompromising Approach to Safety

Transitioning to operator-out deployments required a safety architecture robust enough for the most active commercial sites.

Bedrock’s upfitted excavators can operate in normal site conditions alongside other equipment and do not require any operational barriers for safe operation. If a person or unauthorized object gets too close, the excavator stops automatically until the area is clear. This ensures Bedrock’s technology consistently sets the highest possible bar for what responsible autonomy looks like, ultimately earning the trust of the crews, contractors, and communities that depend on these projects.

Accelerated Development Through Expertise

None of this would be possible without the team that built it.

Bedrock’s co-founders and much of the early team came from Waymo, where they helped build and deploy the world’s most mature autonomous driving fleet, and the broader team spans expertise in robotics, machine learning, LLMs, data infrastructure, autonomous systems safety, and automotive hardware. Seasoned operations teams and equipment operators who bring decades of field knowledge work alongside Bedrock’s engineers throughout the development process.

That depth has been matched by an equally serious commitment to building alongside the industry. Bedrock’s slate of general contractor partners have shared access to real sites and real workflows throughout development, helping shape a system that performs in the conditions contractors actually face. Together, Bedrock’s fifteen partners operate across 23 states and on some of the most consequential manufacturing, industrial, and infrastructure projects in the country.

This combination of rare expertise and collaboration enabled the move from founding to commercial deployments in just two years, compared to the decades-long path to scaling autonomous driving.

The Road to Orchestrated Job Sites

Excavators are only the starting point.

The mission extends far beyond a single machine type. It is about creating a new layer of autonomous orchestration for the equipment that builds our world. The technology and infrastructure are designed to generalize efficiently to new capabilities and new machine types. Other highly utilized machines like dump trucks, dozers, and loaders will follow, eventually enabling coordinated autonomous fleets that work together the way the best crews in the world do.

The United States has immense infrastructure ambitions to fulfill. Bedrock’s announcement is a major leap towards building the technology-driven step-function in operational efficiency required to meet them.

About Bedrock Robotics
Founded in 2024, Bedrock Robotics is building the future of autonomous construction. Based in San Francisco, the company is led by former Waymo engineers who helped pioneer the systems that made fully autonomous vehicles a reality on public roads. Now they’re bringing that same deep expertise to construction equipment, developing technology that will enable contractors to improve safety, expand capabilities, and compress schedules to meet growing demand at scale. Bedrock is working alongside leading general contractors to co-develop autonomous solutions to retrofit machines like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with a vision to make fully autonomous fleets standard on job sites across the country.

Bedrock Robotics has raised $350M to date, backed by CapitalG, the Valor Atreides AI Fund, Xora, 8VC, Eclipse, Emergence Capital, Perry Creek Capital, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Tishman Speyer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgian, Incharge Capital, C4 Ventures, and others.

Press contact
Press@bedrockrobotics.com

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1 Workforce stats
2 Navigating the Construction Worker Shortage in 2025
3 Imagining construction’s digital future | McKinsey
4 CPWR Mental Health in the Construction Industry


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