00:00Bedrock Robotics co-founder and CEO joins us here in SF.
00:02Let's get to the basics of what we're talking about.
00:04We're talking about excavators, dump trucks, other construction equipment,
00:08but there is no driver in the cab.
00:10That's correct. Thank you for having me on, Ed.
00:13We're building the Bedrock Operator.
00:15This is a suite of sensors, compute, and software
00:17that transforms existing heavy machinery,
00:20such as excavators and other machines,
00:23and enables them to be fully autonomous.
00:25And our customers are the contractors
00:28who leverage this technology to be able to build faster, safer, and more predictably.
00:33Okay, let's get to the technology.
00:34So, you know, analogous with an autonomous vehicle,
00:38a robo-taxi, or a self-driving truck,
00:40there's a suite of sensors.
00:42That's right.
00:42Tell me about them.
00:43Who offers them, produces them,
00:45and then you must have your own software platform too.
00:48That's correct.
00:48So we use a combination of cameras and LiDAR.
00:51It gives us 360-degree visibility around the machine.
00:54That's incredibly valuable both for productivity as well as safety,
00:57which is one of the biggest challenges in this space.
01:00We have compute that is on the machine that does the...
01:03That's the brain behind operating the system.
01:07Who provides the compute?
01:09We use NVIDIA chips for compute,
01:11and then we integrate our own systems around it.
01:14I'm not surprised by that.
01:16The audience is probably not surprised by that.
01:17Yeah, they're still pretty incredible
01:21and oftentimes a standard for these sort of systems.
01:23Now, what's nice is that that ecosystem's matured a lot,
01:25and so we're able to really focus our energies on the software
01:28that brings a level of precision and capability
01:31that was previously impossible in these sort of spaces.
01:33The news here is that this is real.
01:36You've deployed in three commercial sites, right?
01:39How real?
01:40I mean, are you able to book revenues on these three sites?
01:44In other words, someone's actually paying you for this,
01:46and what's the scale of the deployment?
01:48Yeah, we are.
01:50So we are on three different sites with three different partners,
01:53Sun Construction, Zachary, Champion Site Prep.
01:57There are three different projects,
01:58everything from water treatment facilities
02:01to other types of infrastructure.
02:03These are paid deployments that are doing real work
02:06that's on the critical path of these projects,
02:08and these are projects that are doing up to multiple millions
02:15of cubic yards of earthwork as a project,
02:17and we're doing a subset of that.
02:18So now is the big question.
02:20Why is there a need for autonomous construction equipment?
02:25It's a great question.
02:26There is an unprecedented need to build.
02:29So we're on-shoring, manufacturing.
02:31There's housing shortages, road shortages,
02:33the data center boom that we've all seen,
02:36water treatment facilities.
02:37All of these are pushing on an already incredibly strained industry,
02:41and the labor supply is actually continuing to fall
02:45where some of the contractors we partner with
02:47are seeing huge retirement rates.
02:49And so there's an absolute bottleneck
02:51that effectively becomes a radiation on the whole economy
02:54when you can't build the things that the country needs.
02:55So in very simple terms, there are not enough drivers nor operators
03:00to be inside the cab of any piece of construction equipment.
03:04That's right, and some of these are actually incredibly complex pieces of equipment.
03:07Like an excavator operator needs many years to actually become competent
03:10because these are incredibly complex, sophisticated machines.
03:14What about the utilization rate then?
03:15What can you achieve in a 12-hour shift
03:18with an autonomous piece of equipment relative to a human-driven?
03:22Yeah, well, you nailed it.
03:24So we're already close to human productivity.
03:26We're going to reach human productivity very soon.
03:28What is the benchmark of human productivity in a construction site?
03:32So, for example, the volume of Earth moved in a period of time.
03:35Right.
03:36But you nailed a really important point that already these machines are oftentimes sitting idle.
03:42Contractors are turning down work because they physically can't reach the demand
03:47with the capacity that they have.
03:50And so this allows you not only to fulfill that,
03:52but you can actually now start compressing schedules
03:54and doing more work in a physical block of time
03:56by exceeding what typically would be one shift
03:59and working longer stretches that actually can compress schedules.
04:03Team, let's bring the pictures back up
04:04because I think you can't get enough of showing it in action.
04:09It's quite a sight.
04:10That is a well-known brand of construction equipment.
04:13I'm sure others are available.
04:15But it reminds me of a period of time where I was covering the EV industry.
04:19There was a section of that industry
04:21that just wanted to retrofit the powertrain of existing commercial vehicles.
04:25So you must have to partner with those OEMs
04:29and add your technology stack on top.
04:31Well, the interesting thing is that a lot of these machines
04:33are actually designed incredibly well
04:35to be able to be transformed into autonomously capable
04:39and to do it safely without a major redesign.
04:43That's not the case in public road cars and trucks.
04:45There's specific aspects of these machines
04:47that actually make them much more suitable for this sort of automation.
04:52So what is the constraint on your ability
04:55to build the fleet that you can then deploy?
04:57Because the number of projects you take on
04:59will be dictated by how many of these autonomous machines can be deployed.
05:03That's exactly right.
05:04And so this is where it helps to have millions of these machines
05:07already out there that become part of the pool
05:10that you can go in and pursue.
05:12And just like we saw in other big waves of technology like this,
05:17such as autonomous driving,
05:18there's a really deep challenge in the zero to one
05:20where you're trying to deploy a system safely and productively.
05:24And then there's another suite of challenges
05:25when you start to scale it into the hundreds and thousands and beyond.
05:29And so now it's a matter of really maturing the autonomy capabilities
05:33and starting this flywheel to move into new capabilities and new machines
05:38and then be able to really orchestrate them
05:40where you can start to complete more cohesive sets of work.
05:42But in simple terms, you take delivery of the piece of equipment,
05:47you retrofit it with your stack,
05:48and then you put it out in the real world.
05:50Even better, we do it on site.
05:52It takes us a few hours.
05:53It's 100% reversible and it's ready to go as soon as it's complete.
05:57So it's a really incredible kind of ability
05:59to start to really deploy and scale this.
06:01So the way that we describe the flywheel at the top of the show is,
06:04you know, there is AI-driven demand for the machinery
06:07and AI is answering the call.
06:09Talk about some of the data center projects.
06:11You know, the hyperscalers themselves that end up renting
06:15or owning the capacity directly looking to you,
06:18or is there still a degree of separation with the contractor?
06:21You know, they must have an interest in this field.
06:24Yeah, our direct customers are the contractors,
06:27and we pursue the work that is most valuable to them.
06:30That happens to obviously have a big pool in data centers,
06:33but we also see projects of all sorts, highways,
06:37water treatment facilities, housing developments.
06:40And so we end up enabling them to take on more of this work
06:44and be able to scale with those demands.
06:47And oftentimes we do see this push actually not from our direct customers,
06:51the contractors, but the end owners that actually get a huge benefit
06:54in the predictability.
06:55Is there any end owner that's particularly interested in you at the moment?
06:58There's a large number from the broader ecosystem in space,
07:04and it's actually both end customers as well as developers,
07:07where as you can imagine, one of the really interesting impacts of this is that
07:11if you can compress schedules, the types of projects that previously didn't pencil out
07:15because of the price of loans and so forth suddenly do.
07:18And so this actually becomes incredibly expansionary for commercial developments
07:22and housing developments that previously would be out of reach.
07:23Very interested in your commercial progress.
07:25In autonomous haulage or trucking, you can do a very easy comparison,
07:30dollar per mile, against a human-driven truck.
07:32Where are you at dollar per ton of waste moved,
07:36or is it done by time against the human-operated machine?
07:41We've explored a few options with our partners,
07:43and we've figured it aside actively.
07:45Sometimes this is a license where it becomes like an operator
07:48that you've brought on to join your fleet.
07:51Some have done it by productivity, like volumes of cubic yards that are moved.
07:56What's nice is that one of the biggest challenges that contractors face
07:59is uncertainty of the length of projects.
08:02This actually allows them to tighten that up,
08:03which gives them huge flexibility in taking on more work
08:06and tightening up the windows in which they do it.
08:08Thank you very much.
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