Boris Sofman Went from Leading Autonomous Trucking at Waymo to Building Bedrock Robotics

Bedrock Robotics Retrofits Excavators for Driverless Earthwork

Boris Sofman spent five years at Waymo pushing freeway autonomy, then founded Bedrock Robotics. Bedrock retrofits existing excavators into operatorless machines because purpose-built platforms cost hundreds of millions and take years, while the machines cost $600,000 and construction labor is scarce. Physical AI will define the next decade, and heavy machinery is the fastest place to deploy it.

Takeaways

• Bedrock retrofits machines instead of building new ones. Purpose-built autonomy platforms cost hundreds of millions and take four to five years, so Bedrock converts existing Caterpillar excavators into operatorless machines. Its first driverless systems ship later in 2026, two years after founding, on machines that cost $600,000.
• Construction autonomy adds capacity without layoffs. Partners expect 50% of their workers to retire within seven years, and no one gets laid off. Shifts stretch from eight to ten hours to 15 or more. Bid contingency falls from 5% to 2%, and one person supervises 10 machines.
• Freeway autonomy needs extreme reliability. A vehicle stopped in a lane carries a 6-8% risk of a rear-end collision, so Waymo needed space-shuttle redundancy. A kernel panic every 500,000 miles would consume the failure budget, and the first 100 driverless freeway miles required 1,000 times higher reliability than San Francisco.
• Trucking dwarfs ride-hailing as a market. US ride-hailing brings in about $50bn in revenue against a trillion-dollar trucking industry. The sector sees over 5,000 deaths a year, 11-hour federal driving limits, 55-60% of long-haul time spent on overnights, and 25-30% of trucks running near-empty.
• Autonomous trucking arrives this decade. Aurora starts its earliest ramp this year with tens to about 100 units. Sofman expects Waymo to return to trucking by the end of the decade. He predicts meaningful driverless miles in the early 2030s and a sizable driverless share by 2035.
• Physical AI will define the next decade. Sofman argues it will define the next decade, since 80% of the world economy is physical and the US drives 3tn miles a year against Waymo's 200m. He expects no single model, since platforms and sensors differ, and sees vertically integrated companies becoming trillion-dollar businesses.

Sofman's path to Bedrock

1. Born in Moscow, he was six when his family left the Soviet Union in 1989 after a decade-long effort to emigrate. They settled in the Dallas suburbs for his father's telecommunications work.
2. The video game Civilization drew him into AI. He studied at Carnegie Mellon.
3. He spent roughly five years at Waymo, leading autonomous trucking and technology teams including perception. He helped launch the Jaguar vehicles in San Francisco and unified the car and truck stacks.