Bedrock Robotics raises $270M to bring autonomous heavy machinery to construction, mining, and data centers

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Macron I We'll back to France.

Speaker 2: We we will we We'll will close France. We have Boris Soffman waiting from He's the CEO and co founder and he's here in the TV at Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Sorry to keep you waiting.

Speaker 13: Yeah, Joe. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Thanks. Glad to have you. Do we have a phone call like a decade ago about Anki because we were both in the Andreessen portfolio? Is that possible?

Speaker 13: It's, very possible. That was quite a journey.

Speaker 2: I remember because we were the only two portfolio companies that were, like, selling something online. And so I was like, okay. Connect me with the one person that's not just doing software. I need to know how this works. And you kind of broke it down, it was very fascinating.

Speaker 13: This is be before the physical stuff became in style again. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It is in style.

Speaker 13: Had a hard time.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But first time on the show, please introduce yourself and explain what the company does.

Speaker 13: Thank you. First of pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Of course. Name is Boris Hoffman. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. Yeah. And we're developing autonomy technologies for heavy machinery. And so these are the sort of machines you see in construction like excavators, wheel loaders

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 13: Motor graders, compactors, but also in all types of other industries like mining, agriculture, lumber. And so they're the workforce for a pretty sizable percentage of the world's GDP. And these are sectors that are going through pretty massive labor challenges. And so we're bringing autonomy solutions that can enable them to be fully operatorless to be able to execute work with a lot of flexibility and bypass a lot of the constraints that right now are really challenging for not just The US, the whole world.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Why is there a labor shortage? Why don't people wanna drive cool trucks and tractors and Yeah. Finding equipment dream. Yeah. It feels like it feels like a dream.

Speaker 13: They always want to drive it for for a little bit, but it's a really, really tough tough work. So, you know, the amount of people going into this line of work is just way smaller than it used to be in the past. You also have a fragmentation where you can be an expert bulldozer operator, but you're not an expert excavator operator. And so you end up having these, you know, these challenges. And what what's happening is that the average age is getting higher and higher. Retirement are skyrocketing. People are not coming into this line of work. Temperatures are high. Vibrations of these machines are really painful. And it oftentimes takes many, many years to become even decently competent at these machines because they're very complicated. And so you end up having giant spikes in demand, for example, from the data center boom and onshoring and manufacturing, housing shortages, infrastructure work. But a lot of our partners are expecting half the workforce to retire the next seven years, and so it's going the opposite direction

Speaker 7: Wow.

Speaker 13: In an industry that already had 800,000 workers shortage over the next few years.

Speaker 1: Talk about so so it sounds like you guys are building hardware, software that can kind of bolt on to existing machinery. Talk about that decision making process. It feels smart for a number of reasons. And I also want to understand how the actual equipment manufacturers are thinking about autonomy. We were talking about Caterpillar last week. It's been if you were a hardware VC ten years ago, you probably should have just put all your money in Caterpillar based on on how stocks traded. Right. It's right. Double digits every single year for for almost a decade. But but, yeah, talk about kind of the the approach that you're taking.

Speaker 13: Mhmm. So my roots and a lot of our roots from Bedrock, we actually came out of Waymo. So I was an executive there for about five years. I was leading trucking. Various technology teams supported the cars as well. And in that world, we had to redesign the fundamental platform every time you would make a new vehicle. So you wanna put a Jaguar on the road or a Daimler Freightliner or a Hyundai, you're doing a multi $100,000,000, like, multi many year program because, you know, these are very complicated, you know, systems that needed to be redesigned for safety reasons. Mhmm. The advantage that we have in in the space and the approach we're taking is that we can actually retrofit existing heavy machinery. So take a Caterpillar excavator, for example. We can turn it into autonomously capable with a sensor compute outfit, and now you take this half $1,000,000 machine that a general contractor already owns, and it could become autonomous for the scope of work that's cleared for.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And with with autonomous vehicles, when you when you look at the cost of Waymo, that's been obviously one one of the criticisms of it. If you have a half $1,000,000 machine and then you're put bolting on five you know, 50 ks or 100 ks worth of sensors in order to run it autonomously, the economics can make a lot of sense quickly because the operator was getting paid. Maybe you can't find the operator, and they also were probably getting paid quite well. So I imagine like the economic trade is pretty good.

Speaker 13: Economic economic trade is fantastic because the cost of hardware is also, a lot lower because now there's an ecosystem of components being driven by automotive space and others. And so we can, enable these machines to be autonomous, you know, for a lot less cost. But then you're able to operate eight hours a day, fifteen hours a day, twenty four hours a day. You can compress schedules. You improve safety. You get visibility of your work, higher predictability. And so when you change the physics of how you actually manage the operations of a construction project like this, suddenly, you can get a lot more productive and fundamentally expand the sector, and you can utilize your machinery a lot more with a lot less constraints, which immediately helps general contractors and subcontractors who are our customers in the end do work.

Speaker 2: Makes sense. One interesting decision from Waymo is the electrification of the fleet. That feels like it unlocks a specific acceleration curves, very precise, and people really rave about the driving experience sitting in the passenger seat because it's computer controlled. Is there a major barrier to electrification of construction equipment because of the energy density and the work that needs to be done and maybe charging infrastructure? Like, you expect an electric, you know, tractor to be rolled out in a decade or is are we further away?

Speaker 1: Just plug it in like one of those vacuums that has a cord.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I just want to say about, like, electrification of, construction equipment broadly.

Speaker 13: Yeah. It's funny. Electric things are actually easier to control because they're much more predictable in the output

Speaker 2: That's right.

Speaker 13: Of of what they have. So there's actually advantages from a, you know, from a vehicle standpoint. The you know, in construction, what's challenging is you get pulled into really strange locations in the middle of nowhere. And so infrastructure is just very complex. And so for example, data centers are getting pulled into strange locations because availability and power. So, you know, you end up having a practicality that's, you know, kinda tougher on that in that domain. And so for us, we're embracing the ecosystem that exists today, which is incredibly designed machines. They just happen to be, you know, still, you know, not not electric yet.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 13: But I believe, you know, when you do a robotaxi, you can have hubs that have, like, massive large scale charging facilities. It'll take more time, I think, for that to propagate into into construction where, by definition, you're going to areas that are pretty greenfield that don't have that infrastructure.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Based on everything you've seen over your career, do you think it's a good time to start a new AI toy company now?

Speaker 13: It's like, yeah, we were maybe a little bit ahead of our time. You know, what what's interesting is the technology that has skyrocketed over the last five, six years that has enabled autonomy on public roads and industrial equipment, it kind of applies everywhere. And I think more generally, the physical world is gonna get reinvented because now suddenly you have these incredible interface capabilities through, like, large language models and super sophisticated AI. You have lower cost of hardware. You have cloud compute you know, cloud AI that can now be on a wireless network connected. So those are building blocks for all every industry effectively. And so I think that, you know, we've seen this, like, transformation on the digital side with, you know, LLMs and OpenAI, Gemini, and others. The physical world is still 80% of the world's GDP. This is the future where Yeah. You comply this to every single sector, then every one of them can have a reinvented experience.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I I just thought about, like, a lot of I mean, the the Waymo's are incredibly reliable, but there's plenty of AI models that have little hallucinations. But if you design the kids toy to sort of embrace that, we talked to what was that company that was you take a pic or you describe whatever you want and then prints a sticker? I think it was called Stickerbox

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: For kids. It was just like this it was sort of leaning into all the rough edges of AI in a very positive way that's like low stakes.

Speaker 13: Content becomes, like, so much easier because of the Totally. So I think I mean, generally, think it's gonna reinvent gaming and entertainment like this just because of the like, you don't have to script the entire experience like you you used to. The other nice thing is what you mentioned is that, you know, when you are dealing with autonomy in a lot of applications, you're so sensitive to the worst case of what happens, not the average case, which is what most of AI has to focus on. Mhmm. And so that adds an incredibly high bar to releasing a car and, you know, to go drive a list in San Francisco or a 110,000 pound machine to go and do an excavation project in a you know, for a factory. There's a lot of other sectors that can benefit from the fact that there's a softer, you know, kind of boundary and resilience to, you know, certain mistakes. And in general, I think that you see this shape in every industry. That's why legal LMs or or medical LMs have, a large larger bar than a chatbot that maybe keeps you company and, you know, gives you some does some research that's not absolutely, like, accuracy critical.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: How many how many OEMs are you do you think you guys wanna be working with in in, let's say, five years? Like, can you reach a critic can you reach kind of critical scale working with Caterpillar and John Deere and kinda going down whatever the the kind of power law players? Or is there more of a long tail that I'm not aware of?

Speaker 13: So there's absolutely millions of these machines. And almost always, the bottleneck is that the labor to operate them is, you know, is limited. In The United States, you know, every every geographical region will have its biases. Today, we're working with on Caterpillar machines. Most OEMs are actually moving towards this drive by wire architecture where you can control these machines in a very efficient fashion electrically. That's a proves to be a, you know, big enabler, which didn't exist for the, you know, car, truck space among other challenges. And so but what's nice is that we're the OEM ecosystem is probably not gonna be the constraint for many, many years mainly because there's such a prevalence of machines. And eventually, these technologies will probably influence the buying cycles into the subset of OEMs that actually have the capabilities like this.

Speaker 2: Is there an OBD two port on these Caterpillar vehicles? Yeah. There's a they have a

Speaker 13: campus interface, and so you, yeah, you tend to have, you know, signals passing through, and so you can, you know, plug in. And and in fact, I think the industry's benefited from the fact that there's a lot of foresight from companies like Caterpillar and Deere Yeah. To interoperate with high end GPS systems, the driver assist systems that help you auto level a blade, for example. And so you have the prerequisites of autonomy even if the capabilities on the AI side weren't ready yet.

Speaker 2: That makes a ton of sense.

Speaker 1: Jordy? Got some news?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened? Let's bring down the mallet from the Lambda Cloud. Oh

Speaker 13: my god. That's a big mallet.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We got some heavy machinery here. We got some gong machinery.

Speaker 2: How much did you raise?

Speaker 13: We raised $270,000,000. Oh my god. We got a gong.

Speaker 1: There we go. Congratulations. There

Speaker 2: I It's dramatic. It's very dramatic here. We like theatrics on this show. We enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come

Speaker 1: yeah. I'm super excited about what you guys are building and yeah. Glad you're glad you're doing it. Just like the even just yeah. The all the the speed ups, every the more that we can speed up every single, you know, project in the real world from, you know, a a train to an airport to someone's home, the better. Yeah. So

Speaker 13: The whole economy will feel it. It's you know, it could be a radiation on the whole sector, and hopefully, this opens up a pretty broad generation of building at a scale we haven't seen yet.

Speaker 2: I love it. Well, thank you so much

Speaker 1: for Yeah. Didn't even get into software. I'm hoping I'm hoping it feels like a video game when I'm, you know Yeah. When I'm just kind of observing my fleet.

Speaker 2: Agent Swarms. Yeah. Agent swarms.

Speaker 13: Orchestration of these, that's the that's the future. And Yeah. Yeah. For sure. But Amazing. Gentlemen, thank you.

Speaker 1: Have a great rest great having on.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 13: Yeah. Congratulations. Goodbye.

Speaker 2: In other news, mister Beast bought a bank. That's fun.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Mister Beast

Speaker 8: Beast Industries.

Speaker 1: This was a

Speaker 2: Gen z focused banking app.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Launched in the twenty tens, very hot in the twenty twenty, twenty twenty one fintech era. Remember when every when every, you know, one of these companies was trading at a 100 times revenue? They raised something like a couple $100,000,000 of equity, I believe, and then a bunch of debt

Speaker 2: Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: As well. Yeah. So anyways, unclear. This felt I don't think this was probably a great outcome for the venture investors Okay. Involved.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: But I It unlocks Who knows who knows, like, if if it's a a a they bought a 100% of it or Yeah. Or whatever. But, yeah, now you have, you know, one of the biggest, you know, distribution platforms like built in the world. I do wonder if they'll be able to go international from day one, just given that so much of misuse this audience is so international. Very global. Well We'll have to figure it. Very cool. This was something I remember people have been saying since at least kind of that 2021 era, MrBeast should have a bank. Yeah. Like, you should have a effectively a commodity business that's differentiated by brand and your ability to get users to sign up in an expensive way, and something that he can offer to everyone. Yeah. Something that you know, so anyways, this this Yeah. And and extremely scalable, obviously. So I'll be interested to track this as they I'm assuming every single MrBeast video will have have a