On 17 August Bedrock Robotics went on Bloomberg television to say that its excavators were digging on three paid construction jobs with nobody in the cab, at the same time, on two sites in Texas and one in Nevada. Construction Dive put the customers on the record two days later: a water treatment plant Sundt Construction is building in Nevada, a 1.2 million cubic yard sitework job for Zachry Construction, and a job for Champion Site Prep in Texas. The company calls it the first fully autonomous excavator deployment on live commercial sites. It follows a year of the same machines working under a supervisor's eye.
The claim is specific enough to check, which is rare in this category, and the contractors are large enough to be asked. What Bedrock has not published is the production rate, the hours per day, the yards per hour against a manned machine, or the price of the retrofit. This article lays out what the company and its customers have said, what a second contractor running remote haul trucks has counted, and what a contractor should ask before the first retrofit kit arrives.
What Bedrock bolted on
Bedrock does not sell an excavator. It sells a retrofit: a sensor and compute package that mounts on an existing machine in the 20 to 80 ton class, with cameras and other sensors on the cab roof and counterweight that give the machine a full view around itself. The company's founders and much of its early team came from Waymo, and the pitch borrows the robotaxi playbook: run under supervision until the data says the machine handles the site, then take the person out. Boris Sofman, the chief executive, told Construction Dive that the machines operate autonomously only in conditions that have been approved, and that a detected fault pauses the work and stops the machine. Bloomberg's segment showed the retrofit taking a few hours on site.
The money behind it is large for the category. Bedrock came out of stealth in July 2025 with $80 million, raised $270 million more in February, and in the week of its announcement Gravis Robotics, a Swiss competitor that also retrofits existing excavators, closed a $200 million round led by SoftBank. Construction Dive counted nearly a billion dollars into three firms in the space, including FieldAI's $405 million. Sofman's stated reason is the size of the jobs: more projects with millions of cubic yards to move, and a trade where an excavator operator takes about five years to master and excavators make up about a quarter of a contractor's fleet.
None of those figures says what the machine does in a shift. Bedrock's own statement of ambition is schedule compression: run into the night, add more machines that work together with the excavators, and shorten the earthworks phase. As of this writing no customer has published a cycle count, and Bedrock's announcement did not include one. A contractor reading the coverage should treat the deployment as confirmed and the productivity as unreported.