Bedrock Robotics raises $600 million in Series C funding

Bedrock Robotics announced on the 26th that it has secured $600 million in a Series C funding round. The company, which develops technology to make existing heavy construction machinery fully autonomous, achieved a post-money valuation of $4.1 billion. CapitalG and Emergence Capital jointly led the investment round. New investors joining the company include the US Innovative Technology Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Temasek. Existing investors such as 8VC and NVIDIA also participated in the round. With this new capital, Bedrock Robotics has raised nearly $1 billion in total funding to date. The company reported that its customer base has more than doubled since last year, driven by construction firms seeking to address labor shortages through automation. In mid-August of this year, a fully autonomous excavator began performing paid work at a commercial job site. The latest customer to adopt the system is Haydon, an employee-owned general contractor based in Tempe, Arizona. Haydon is using the technology for fully autonomous earthworks at a remote site in Texas. The company plans to expand the use of the system to construction projects in advanced manufacturing, transportation, water and sewage, data centers, and medical facilities.

Haydon also intends to test the automation of trench digging and larger machinery. The funds raised will be used to increase the number of machines equipped with the company's system on commercial construction sites in the United States. The company will also use the capital to build on-site, sales, and operational teams to integrate automation into daily construction work. Bedrock Robotics selected excavators as its initial target because they account for about one-quarter of the machinery owned by many construction companies. Excavators have a wide range of uses and offer greater freedom of movement than other construction equipment, making them one of the most difficult machines to master. The company stated that a system capable of handling this complexity can be more easily extended to other types of machinery. The system is retrofitted onto existing heavy equipment. It uses sensors to capture the entire perimeter of the vehicle, eliminating blind spots that are difficult even for skilled operators to see. The technology employs a large-scale machine learning model trained on sites across the United States. This model allows the machinery to navigate around obstacles such as uneven terrain, trenches, and rocks while shaping the ground according to plan.

Construction companies can monitor the progress of work and operational metrics at any time. Autonomous excavators work alongside on-site workers and other machinery without changing current work methods. The company noted that by assigning repetitive daily tasks, such as loading dump trucks, to autonomous machines, skilled operators can be redirected to more specialized work. Development of the technology is being conducted jointly with major general contractors. The company aims to create a hybrid fleet of machines that operate autonomously and coordinate across entire job sites in the future. The need for this technology is driven by a shortage of skilled labor in the construction industry. According to the company, the United States will need to fill a shortage of approximately 1.7 million skilled tradespeople annually until 2035. Eighty-seven percent of construction companies reported having vacancies in hourly skilled trades. Eighty-eight percent of these companies stated that hiring for these roles is as difficult or more difficult than it was a year ago. BRIDGE reported the story.