Even as stores and offices emptied out around it during the pandemic, the downtown location of Ross Dress for Less thrived. Now the Mid-Market retailer will have a new upstairs neighbor that’s nearly equally hyped.
Bedrock Robotics, an AI startup focused on autonomous construction equipment, has agreed to lease the top two floors at 799 Market St., totaling around 35,000 square feet, according to sources familiar with the deal.
The eight-story building on the corner of Fourth and Market streets has long been anchored by Ross on the ground floor but struggled with some office vacancies until it was sold for $44 million last year to Sansome Street Advisors.
San Francisco-based SSA purchased 799 Market St. after the area had been devastated during the pandemic by a mass exodus of retailers and office tenants. The office vacancy rate of Mid-Market is 46.8%, SoMa is 50%, and Union Square’s is 24.2%, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
The Ross store is adjacent to the San Francisco Centre Mall, which was shuttered in December after years in financial limbo.
Signing Bedrock as a headline office tenant caps off a year in which SSA was able to leverage its lower cost basis to fully lease the 143,605-square-foot property. The building was previously owned by ASB Real Estate Investments, which paid more than $141 million for it in 2016.
Bedrock, founded in 2024, currently occupies a suite at 703 Market St. but is poised for growth after raising $270 million from investors (opens in new tab) last month. The round, led by an investment arm of Alphabet, valued the startup at $1.75 billion. Other investors included 8VC and the venture arm of Nvidia.
Reps for Bedrock and SSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Several Bedrock employees, including CEO Boris Sofman, CTO Kevin Peterson, and cofounder Ajay Gummall, previously worked at Waymo.
Bedrock Robotic’s autonomous system on a bulldozer. | Source: Courtesy of Bedrock Robotics
The company says its AI products can be added to equipment from major manufacturers to augment human labor. Its Bedrock Operator platform transforms the equipment into fully autonomous fleets through reversible hardware installations and autonomy software. The system uses 360-degree cameras with LiDAR.
After closing on 799 Market St. last spring, SSA leased the fifth floor to cybersecurity firm Semgrep in August. The top floors that Bedrock just leased could be connected via an internal staircase that has yet to be constructed.
To finance the building purchase, SSA borrowed up to $36 million from Athena Lending Company, according to property records. The building was completed in 1968.