heavy-equipment
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The Truck Company Quietly Building the Operating System for Tough Work
From fire engines and boom lifts to airport robots and the Postal Service's next delivery van, Oshkosh turns hard jobs into a shared engineering problem. Its century-old trick is making technology travel between machines that rarely appear in the same conversation.
Vermeer Corporation
Vermeer Corporation is a family-owned Iowa manufacturer that turns tough, dirty, essential work into machines. Founded in 1948 by farmer-inventor Gary Vermeer, the company built the first commercially viable large round hay baler and grew into a global maker of trenchers, horizontal directional drills, vacuum excavators, wood grinders and forage equipment. Now in its third generation of family leadership under CEO Jason Andringa, Vermeer is 'Equipped to Do More' - serving agriculture, construction, underground utilities, recycling and environmental markets from Pella, Iowa across six continents.
Renterra
Renterra is a Chicago-based software company building a modern, AI-powered operating system for the equipment rental industry. Founded in 2022 by Andy Feis and Nick Hibberd, the cloud platform unifies inventory, contracts, online booking, payments, maintenance, and reporting for heavy equipment rental businesses across the US and Canada. It has raised $16M total, including a $9M Series A led by Avenue Growth Partners in January 2026, and serves hundreds of rental companies managing hundreds of millions in annual rental transactions.
Bedrock Robotics
Bedrock Robotics is a San Francisco startup retrofitting existing heavy construction equipment - excavators, dozers, articulated trucks - with an AI kit that turns them into 24/7 autonomous machines. Founded in 2024 by former Waymo leaders, the company raised a $270M Series B in February 2026 at a $1.75B valuation to scale its 'Bedrock Operator' platform across active job sites in the US.
Tom Eliaz
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.