They helped make Waymo go. Now they're building AI-powered robots to solve America's labor crisis
To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman—a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive—cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous.
Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world's most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower.
'I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,' Sofman tells Fast Company. 'We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.'
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