Startup Series: Scythe
Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Startup Series is Jack Morrison, Co-founder and CEO at Scythe.
Scythe recently announced a $42M Series B round of financing led by Energy Impact Partners to grow and scale their product line of autonomous electric commercial lawnmowers. We tend to focus on electric vehicles and home efficiency when discussing the need to electrify everything. But over the next 5-10 years most of us will be surprised by just how many things in our daily lives will move from loud, smelly, gasoline-powered engines to quiet, odorless electric motors. This podcast has featured electric solutions for pleasure craft boating, motorcycles, passenger buses, semi trucks, and even cargo shipping. And in most cases, the business models of the electric versions of these things are innovative in some way or another too.
The Scythe team is pioneering a new usage-based model for their mowers and the company believes it offers a more sustainable way for landscaping companies to manage their cashflows and help their employees get the job done.
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Jack Morrison / Scythe
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Episode recorded on March 7, 2023.
In this episode, we cover:
[2:00] Jack's background in programming and robots
[4:00] His transition from 3D scanning to landscaping
[6:48] Climate impact of the landscaping business and Scythe's role in helping curb the emissions footprint
[11:03] Scythe's M.52 mower product
[13:17] Why Scythe chose an electric and autonomous solution
[18:16] The safety side of the company's tech
[22:36] Impacts on landscapers' day to day
[27:45] Technology barriers for incumbent mowing companies
[30:18] Scythe's early traction, progress to date, and market share
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Startup Series is Jack Morrison, CEO and co-founder at Scythe. Scythe recently announced a $42 million Series B round of financing led by Energy Impact Partners to grow and scale their product line of autonomous electric commercial lawnmowers. When we talk about the need to electrify everything, we tend to focus on electric vehicles and home efficiency. But over the next five to 10 years, I think most of us will be surprised by just how many things in our daily lives will move from loud, smelly, gasoline powered engines to quiet odorless electric motors.
(00:39):
On this podcast, we featured electric solutions for pleasure craft boating, motorcycles, passenger buses, semi-trucks, and even cargo shipping. In most cases, the business models of the electric versions of these things are innovative in some way or another too. The Scythe team is pioneering a new usage based model for their mowers and believe that it offers a more sustainable way for landscaping companies to manage their cash flows and help their employees get the job done. But before we dive in, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (01:12):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:13):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:19):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:24):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Jack, welcome to the show.
Jack Morrison (01:39):
Hey, Cody, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Cody Simms (01:41):
Jack, you have been building robots from what I could see at least on your LinkedIn your whole life. There's something on the very earliest entry of your LinkedIn profile about building an autonomous humanoid soccer robot. Maybe walk us through your robot building background and get us up to where you are today.
Jack Morrison (02:01):
Sure. I should own up, my background is very much purely on the software side of things. Scythe is really my first foray into building a team that builds robots. I've studied computer science in undergrad, fell in love with programming and robots through this competition called RoboCup that I did as an undergraduate at a liberal arts school in Maine. Fell ass backwards into robotics and making machines play soccer autonomously. It's this amazing international competition. Travel all over the world to compete against other schools in who could program robots the best. We bought off-the-shelf robots, would program them to play soccer.
(02:41):
At first, it was one-on-one, and then we got up by the time I graduated to four on four games of soccer. Just really fell in love with the ability to make real things happen, like real world interactions occur with your software, which is to me a lot more interesting than pushing pixels around on the screen, though there's a lot you can do with that as well, of course. And after graduating, I ended up doing basically various types of computer vision work, so that's making machines understand the world around them for government applications, military things, and ended up starting a PhD in computer vision and robotics before dropping out a year later.
(03:21):
I realized that the academic world was not for me. I felt like there was a lot of more exciting things happening in startups at the time and actually left to start my own 3D scanning company back in 2015. We ended up selling that business to another company here in Boulder, Colorado. I joined on there to lead computer vision efforts and build the future of 3D scanning. And that's where I met my co-founder, Davis. We got to work side by side building the future of 3D scanning. The two of us and Isaac, our third co-founder, ended up leaving that company mid 2018 to start Scythe Robotics.
Cody Simms (04:03):
How did you go from building this situational 3D scanning technology to let's focus on the landscaping industry?
Jack Morrison (04:12):
Yeah, not quite so related, but I promise there's a tie there. I wanted to get back into embodied Robotics, where we're actually having this impact on the world writing software to change something about the world, but I really didn't want to build a robotics company that was just making robots because they were cool. I mean, they are cool, but I really felt like there was huge potential for what automation could bring to the world. I saw a lot of friends going into robotic startups, the mid-aughts that really just felt like they didn't have...
(04:46):
They were science experiments of like, "Ooh, wouldn't it be cool to have a robot deliver my burrito," without the business case of a robot deliver burrito was any better than a regular burrito. With that swirling around in my head and seeing the technological hurdles that a lot of the on-road autonomous vehicle companies were going through, wanted something that would thread this needle of what I saw of something that really had a big impact on the world, but was technologically feasible without necessarily having to put $10 billion plus into it so you could get it out into the world in a much shorter timeframe than it felt like a lot of the on-road autonomy was going to take.
(05:25):
One day had a light bulb moment mowing my own lawn in Colorado where realized, A, I really don't like mowing my lawn, B, I'm not good at it. And C, it was this perfect opportunity for robotics because it met those goals. There's this huge labor crisis we can talk about in the landscaping industry. It's not as hard as on-road autonomy. There's just a much more controlled environment. With those two things, we dove headfirst into landscaping.
Cody Simms (05:53):
Amazing. Well, the primary reason I wanted to have you on today was I feel like with what you're building at Scythe, you are the embodiment of the movement to electrify everything. The notion of commercial landscaping and commercial mowers at first blush doesn't seem like the thing that needs to get electrified first and foremost. But if we are in fact electrifying the entire world, there's a decent chunk of emissions that come out of this space.
(06:19):
The more I have thought about it since you and I first met, the more I see mowers, lawn equipment, all of this stuff everywhere. It is pervasive. As long as there's green grass to grow, there is green grass to cut. I'm interested to hear your perspective on how you think about the climate footprints or the climate impact of the landscaping business and what you think Scythe's role is in helping to curb the emissions footprint there.
Jack Morrison (06:48):
Everybody who starts at Scythe all of a sudden starts seeing all of the mowers around town and has that moment of like, "Holy crap, there are a lot of these things. They're everywhere." Every stoplight you pull up to, there's a mower on a trailer or three mowers on a trailer. It's this industry that's really in the background for most people. Again, I think that's why I was really attracted to it. It's out of sight, out of mind, but has this massive impact on our day-to-day health in urban environments. Green space has huge benefits for the mental health of people living in cities.
(07:23):
There's studies that have shown less drug usage, like prescription drug usage, around green spaces, better mental health, better happiness, better physical health. And then on the climate side, it's a huge impact. There's actually 40 million metric tons of CO2e emitted by commercial lawnmowers every year in this country, which puts it on par with agricultural fuel use. All the tractors, all of the harvesting equipment that we use to grow all of our food, about the same emissions. This is just to turn the tall grass into short grass around our homes, offices, municipal parks, soccer fields, all of that.
(08:02):
We look at our bigger mission at Scythe that goes well beyond mowing. Really our mission is to change everything about how we take care of all of our outdoor spaces. But mowing is this amazing beachhead into giving landscapers first of their kind autonomous tools, electrifying the really polluting first step of commercial mowers, and then expanding into all the other gas powered equipment. There is almost no electric equipment in this industry yet. We have the chance to go from the 40 million metric tons of CO2e from mowers and expand that into the rest of this industry's pollution basically.
Cody Simms (08:39):
You mentioned CO2e. I assume unlike a car, a lot of these devices, I'm guessing, don't have catalytic converters. There's different forms of emissions that are being released into the environment when these mowers are out mowing today, not your mowers, but the traditional gas powered mowers are out mowing today. Is that correct?
Jack Morrison (08:58):
Yeah, exactly. Gas mowers are as cheap as you can make them. That means really no emission scrubbing equipment. Just the basics of an internal combustion engine and a tailpipe that tries to redirect the emissions away from the landscaper standing on the back, but generally does a pretty poor job of that as well. Their emissions are a mix of CO2 and VOCs and methane, all sorts of really nasty stuff.
(09:23):
Beyond the climate health impact these mowers have, the VOCs that they emit are a huge contributor to air pollution in cities. In fact, the nitrous oxide that mowers emit is a major contributor to ozone here in Colorado. Because we're so high up, the nitrous oxide reacts with the sunlight and creates ozone that is responsible for really pretty terrible ongoing air pollution in the Denver area.
Cody Simms (09:50):
When you talk about the commercial mower impact, how do you define a commercial mower? Does this need to be like a mini tractor looking thing that you sit on, or does this also include push mowers that are being used for commercial use cases? What's the scope of devices that we're talking about here?
Jack Morrison (10:07):
Sure. Commercial landscaping is really any type of care for outdoor properties that isn't a single family home contract or a golf course. Everything in the middle, like I said. Office parks, municipal areas, soccer fields, housing developments, schools, all of those spaces. A commercial mower could be a mower used for commercial landscaping, but is really any sort of machine that's up to the rugged standards of a professional landscaping contractor. They're not necessarily large ride-on machines.
(10:41):
They can be push mowers. Our commercial mower, M.52, is a stand on machine, so that means you actually stand on a platform on the back of it and there are hand controls on top. It's a common form factor. They come in all shapes and sizes. What's really common about them is that they're rugged. They use really thick steel and they can really get beat up pretty good and keep on running.
Cody Simms (11:03):
Well, let's go into what the Scythe mower looks like then. You mentioned it is a stand on mower. Maybe just describe it for everybody just so they have in their minds what we're talking about as we start to dive into the product.
Jack Morrison (11:16):
Sure. M.52 is a 52-inch stand on commercial mower. There's two drive wheels next to your feet where you stand, a set of two casters up front. The deck is mounted between them, so the mowing deck where the three blades and the motors to run those three blades are. And then right in front of your body, there's a large podium that holds all of our electronics, the cameras for the autonomy, the batteries. And then it has on top of a set of hand controls that allow you to maneuver the machine manually.
(11:48):
That's one of the things I think is somewhat unique about our approach to this is that we're building a robot that can also be controlled completely manually. This isn't something you see usually in sidewalk delivery robots or warehouse robots. It's important for us because we need machines that fit right into landscapers' days. They need to be able to load them on and off trailers, mow manually in some cases where autonomy is not great.
(12:16):
It looks a lot like any other stand on mower, if listeners have seen a stand on mower in their communities, but also has this ability to push a few buttons on the top, essentially say go, and then walk away and let it do the mowing for them.
Cody Simms (12:32):
I'm going to ask too, why is next. As you were deciding to move into this space, why electric and why hasn't that been a major movement yet in this space? Why autonomous? What use cases does autonomy solve in this space and why hasn't that also taken shape in a broad way yet?
(12:54):
On a side note, it does feel like when we imagine dystopian future, AI future, like the killer lawn mowing robot that's chasing you down the sidewalk does come to mind. I'm curious, as we touch about why autonomy to talk about how you're thinking about all the different safety features and whatnot of the machine too.
Jack Morrison (13:12):
Totally reasonable.
Cody Simms (13:14):
No, not at all, but thank you.
Jack Morrison (13:17):
I think why electric and why autonomous actually go really hand-in-hand and, in particular, why there isn't an autonomous or an electric mower that's really become popular to date. There are a few electric mowers out on the market today, but they're incredibly expensive. You look at the cost of a lawnmower sized internal combustion engine compared to a lawnmower sized battery pack. The ICE engine supply chain has just been really well optimized over the last 50 years. It's hard for today's battery packs to be cost competitive. Mowers are 30, 40, $50,000 for electric machines compared to a 12 to 15,000 gas mower.
(13:57):
It's been really hard for them to catch on. And then for us going electric, there are two big reasons. One, even in the face of this cost difference, one is, again, our mission is to help humanity take better care of the whole world and all our outdoor spaces and to do that in a way that itself isn't damaging to the world. It felt really important to us that right off the bat we were being zero emissions, that we were having a climate impact beyond just the work that the machine was doing. That made going electric really a no-brainer for that. But on the other hand, or simultaneously, making a robot that's run off a gas powered engine adds in all of these complications.
(14:43):
I think we take it for granted a lot because this is how most of our cars still run and most of our equipment still works, but using exploding fossil fuels to power all sorts of different belts and pulleys on these machines is really fragile and results in a whole lot of moving parts. A gas mower has around 300 different moving parts on it where our electric machine has about 30. That has huge implications for how much complexity there is in the system, how many things can go wrong, which when it's an autonomous machine, you really want to be able to minimize. Also for the lifetime of these machines.
(15:18):
We want to be able to keep these machines around for a very long time and mowing and doing great work for the environment. Minimizing the various pieces that can break is really important. For us, it went hand in hand to make it electric and make it autonomous because our job got easier when it was electric to make it autonomous. And then on the autonomy and electric side, we take a different business model approach to selling our machine than a traditional electric mower manufacturer. Like I said, those electric mowers are incredibly expensive and folks try and sell them for a huge price.
(15:55):
They don't see a lot of traction. We actually charge on a usage basis, so we charge all our customers by acres mowed by the machine, and that allows us to undercut this whole price conversation about how expensive machines are incentivizes us to build a machine that lasts a long time, that works really well and just changes the whole dynamic around pricing.
Cody Simms (16:17):
Do you continue to own the machine then, or does the landscaping company own the machine and then are paying this licensing fee to use it somehow?
Jack Morrison (16:25):
We continue to own the machine. We're responsible for all the internals of the machine, staying functional from the motors to the batteries to the compute pieces. Our customers are just responsible for sharpening the blades, keeping the tires inflated, and cleaning and charging the machines every night.
Cody Simms (16:42):
They can bring it back to you for service then as needed?
Jack Morrison (16:45):
Exactly, yep. Because there are so few moving parts and it's all instrumented up, we can detect when pretty much anything goes wrong on the machines automatically so that we can get in there and give them service really quickly.
Cody Simms (16:58):
I assume these are connected through 5G cell connectivity at all times. Is that accurate?
Jack Morrison (17:04):
Yeah, they've got cell and wifi connectivity.
Yin Lu (17:09):
Hey, everyone, Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ Membership Community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the pod. We started in 2019 and have grown thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(17:39):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met. Several non-profits have been established. A bunch of hiring has been done, and many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea GMs for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops, and more. Whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important.
(18:06):
If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (18:16):
Talk a bit about the safety side. On autonomy, you've got these robots driving around on fields by themselves. What does that look like? What does the technology involve, and how have you assured safety when you've got moving blades running of their own accord?
Jack Morrison (18:31):
We say internally there really is no autonomy without safety. It's priority number one. Going back and forth in straight lines is actually the easy part. The part that is a challenge for any autonomous machine and that we really focus our time and energy on is doing that in a way that's safe to all of the people we might be around in the environment that we're operating in. We've got two main sets of sensors that we use to understand the world around us.
(18:57):
First, we have eight high dynamic range cameras mounted at the top of the machine, so a pair of eyes basically, a stereo pair in each cardinal direction, forwards, backwards, left, right. That gives us a full 360 degree view of what's around the machine. And then as a second layer of safety, another peel back the onion, the other layer is the ultrasonic sensors. Those are akin to the parking sensors that are in your car. That gives us a very complimentary way to understand if there's anything near us.
(19:30):
Ultrasonic sensors are super resistant to mud or grass clippings say. They'll continue to function even if they get dirty, and they're nice and low to the ground so that they have this good visibility to anything that could pop up around us. And then we fuse those sensors together to get a really comprehensive understanding of where we're operating and what's safe.
Cody Simms (19:52):
How much training do the landscaping companies do for a mower for a given plot of land? I'm going to use an analogy that I'm sure you don't like, but I have a Roomba in my house. Just getting it to understand where my couch is and don't go over that rug because you're going to get stuck in it, et cetera, frankly is a lot of work to manage. These are much, much bigger machines. I assume they're much more high-tech machines as well, presumably, but explain what the process of learning looks like for your machines.
Jack Morrison (20:23):
We luckily have a lot more compute available to us than a Roomba, so we can make the machine much, much smarter. And again, we're able to actually have a human drive that machine around the property in order to teach it more about it. But the basic premise is if you're a commercial landscaper, you've got an M.52 in your truck and you take it to a new property that it's never been to before and none of our M.52 units have been to before, you unload it from the trailer by driving it off, bring it up into the field and teach it the boundary of each contiguous mobile area on that property.
(20:59):
You drive around the northwest corner of the campus or the east soccer field or whatever, teach it all those areas. And then when you want it to mow either that time or when you bring any other machine back, you just put it out into the field, tell it which direction you want it to stripe, how high you want the grass to be cut, hit, go, and it plans all of it on its own and just takes off.
Cody Simms (21:21):
I am picturing a world too where this is happening and I assume there's very little noise and very little smell, which are two things we're accustomed to noticing about lawn care. And that I presume is to some degree a pretty big game changer.
Jack Morrison (21:37):
It is. Smell the grass, not the gas, our tagline. But yeah, it's huge for landscapers. I mean, it's huge for their customers as well. Everyone's been annoyed by a lawnmower at some point driving by their office window, especially during the pandemic. Everybody on Zoom calls knew the pain of a lawnmower or a leaf blower going by.
(21:58):
Being able to give contractors this option that's much quieter and just better for their employees, better for the environment has been a game changer for some of them bidding on new contracts themselves where they're able to say, "Hey, look, we're green. We're electric. We're quiet, and we're autonomous. We're super innovative. Don't you want us to come and be your landscaper of choice instead of those folks rocking the 20-year-old broken down gas machines?"
Cody Simms (22:25):
For the landscapers who are using you in trials today, what are you finding that they are using their time doing while the mowers are out autonomously mowing?
Jack Morrison (22:36):
Basically every landscaper out there today is short-staffed and trying to do more with the people that they have than they really are able to in the hours of work each week. They frequently in the spring run into significant overtime pay because they're so short-staffed and so hard to find folks. What we find is they just do a better job of really fulfilling the contracts that they already have today. One of our customers in Texas actually had a property that he put M.52 out on, and it was one of their least favorite properties. This account manager used to hide from the property manager there.
(23:13):
He was just terrified that he would be lambasted every time he showed up, and it went from being one of their worst accounts to one of their favorite accounts, and actually expanding with that property manager because they were able to finally take care of all of the things that they weren't doing before, pick up the trash, do the edging. There's a lot of trash on this property in particular. Being able to pick up the trash was a huge boost for that relationship. It's nothing groundbreaking. It's really just do the job that they signed up for.
(23:43):
And then as we roll more and more of these machines out with these same customers, we look at them being able to take on new jobs. As they actually split the time of a crew of six into two crews of three, they can actually send that second crew to an entirely new property and grow their business with the same number of people that they had in the first place, which is a huge enabler and endpoint of leverage for contractors.
Cody Simms (24:10):
One of the things that, again, I think is so fascinating about what you're building and really encapsulates a lot of the whole electrify everything movements, is this notion that not only is this better for the climate, for emissions, but it's a better product. You're talking about, A, it doesn't smell. B, it doesn't make noise. C, the lawn care owners, the landscapers who are managing these now can take care of other tasks while it's out running autonomously in the fields. D, it helps them manage the staffing that they have because they're all short-staffed and they're all struggling to find labor.
(24:44):
And then I guess the last question I would have, with all those benefits coming back to the model and the cost model, they're paying you a fee to use this, a utilization fee. At some point, there's a breakeven question for them, which is, I either need to invest cash upfront and buy a new set of gas mowers, or I need to switch over to Scythe and now just have a flat cost basis that I'm operating off of each month. How are you seeing people make that calculation, and what does the equipment replacement cycle look like in the traditional ICE motor world?
Jack Morrison (25:20):
Sure. First, I'll add, E, it's really fun to drive. It's like going from your Ford Focus to a Tesla. All of a sudden, you get a lot more power and bang for your buck, and it's silent to boot. I think that's a non-trivial factor about why it's more interesting for landscapers. Landscapers pay us not a flat fee, but actually by the acres mode by each robot each month. And that's an important distinction because it means everyone at Scythe, the way we know we win is by helping our customers get as much work done as possible because the more work they get done, the more money they can bring in, that means the more money we make.
(25:59):
It's this virtuous cycle. It also means that right off the bat on day one, they're seeing value and they're seeing an ROI from these machines, because the upfront cost is basically just the cost of shipping a new machine to them. And that means that as soon as they get out there, they're getting more work out of the machine basically than they're paying for, and it's immediately valuable to them. The other piece of this equation, like you said, the equipment refresh cycle, it's like every two to maybe four years they're replacing their commercial mowers.
(26:34):
That's somewhere between half and a quarter of their fleet every spring is brand new because these machines only last a couple thousand hours. They got a lot of use put on them.
Cody Simms (26:44):
At what price point roughly?
Jack Morrison (26:46):
12 to 15K.
Cody Simms (26:48):
Oh my goodness gracious! Wow!
Jack Morrison (26:50):
Yeah, the engine just gives out.
Cody Simms (26:52):
That's incredible, running obviously a cash flow oriented business, having to manage that amount of expense refresh.
Jack Morrison (26:59):
And then not to mention the amount of turnover they have in their employee pool. Basically half their mowers and half their employees turn over almost every year, which is a huge headache for them on the cost side, on just the logistics. A lot of them will refer to themselves as iron collectors and that they just have these piles of scrap metal in their yards that are broken down mowers that they use for spare parts.
(27:24):
But ultimately, the engine has just given out. It needs a full rebuild. It's not worth it at that point. It gives us this opportunity to really easily slide into their fleets over time. If they're getting rid of half of their machines, we can just pick a few off every year until we ramp up and scale and then really replace their fleets in earnest quickly.
Cody Simms (27:45):
Why haven't the incumbent mowing companies tried to build a similar product?
Jack Morrison (27:51):
Everybody in this industry is thinking about it. We go to all the trade shows and everybody out there is talking about electrification, talking about autonomy, but it's just super far outside their wheelhouse. If you look at the commodified mower brands in this industry, which there are many of, there's probably 15 different commercial mower brands that are almost identical, they wouldn't say this, but almost identical save for what color they paint the steel, and software and electrification is just really outside their know-how.
(28:24):
They know supply chain management incredibly well. They have these deep networks of contract manufacturers and suppliers to build really cost optimized machines that will last reasonably long for how much they cost. But when it starts to get into optimizing the compute or all of the autonomy things, sensor placement, sensor selection, it's just not something they're used to.
Cody Simms (28:50):
There's a technology barrier there that you all feel like you have an advantage on just because they know how to essentially assemble and market traditional vehicle products.
Jack Morrison (29:00):
They bend steel really well.
Cody Simms (29:03):
You guys are coming at it from a very different technology angle, and it sounds like you're also pioneering a business model that maybe they're not used to seeing with a product led, services oriented business model. They know how to market and sell, right?
Jack Morrison (29:15):
They have super deep dealership networks, which are a major asset in a traditional business. We've seen this with the electric car transition. Ford, GM, they've got these massive dealership networks. They are an asset when it comes to selling traditional cars that need a lot of service. But then you switch to the Tesla Rivian model and all of a sudden you only have to take your car in maybe every couple years. The dealership's business really just evaporates overnight.
(29:43):
For us coming at this from a blank slate, again, looking at much, much reduced maintenance costs, we can take a different approach. We can bring a different culture to this industry. I think that's a critical thing is being a really innovative business from our core. Everything at Scythe is not optimized at all around cost savings and shaving pennies off of every fastener on the machine. We're really focused on revenue growth, on innovation, on giving new tools to landscapers to better take care of outdoor spaces and do it more sustainably.
Cody Simms (30:18):
What has your early traction looked like? If I understand you're in trial phase and pre-order phase at the moment. Talk to us a little bit about the state of Scythe in the market today.
Jack Morrison (30:28):
We built a run of our pre-production M.52 last year. We opened up reservations ala Rivian or Tesla around getting landscapers to express their interest and get their spot in line basically to get M.52 when we roll out to their region. We opened up reservations a little over a year ago. We've got about 7,500 mowers reserved from dozens of customers across the country. We're really excited to get these in their fleets over the coming years.
(31:00):
And then we've got a handful of machines out in Texas and Florida today that we are... I mean, we're getting paid to mow. Nobody gets free mowing, but getting customers to give us great early feedback on these machines and really dial them in before we ramp up production over the next year to start putting them out and mass.
Cody Simms (31:20):
Why Texas and Florida?
Jack Morrison (31:22):
They've got really long growing seasons. We've got some really excited early customers and team members in both areas. Just being warm, being able to mow, and test year round is a huge asset.
Cody Simms (31:33):
How big is the overall market that you see being able to go after?
Jack Morrison (31:38):
The landscaping services industry, again, the sneaky out of sight, but it's $170 billion industry. A lot of work goes into taking care of all of these green spaces, and that's just in the US every year, $170 billion spent on it. Commercial mowing is somewhere around a quarter of that, just the mowing on commercial property. We're looking at 40 or $50 billion of maintenance that we can capture with just M.52.
Cody Simms (32:09):
Talk to us a bit about where you are from a financing perspective. You all just announced a significant Series B round led by a climate tech oriented fund, Energy Impact Partners. Share a bit more about your history there in terms of growing the business from the beginning to where you are today.
Jack Morrison (32:24):
We just closed our $42 million Series B. Really excited to have Energy Impact Partners and ArcTern Ventures onboard, two amazing climate funds. We're going to take this money and use it to grow the business, grow the team, get more mowers out there, and look at really scaling the business to start getting rid of all of these dirty mowers over the next couple years.
Cody Simms (32:49):
What's next? Obviously you're focused I would presume on getting to market with the current mower set and fulfilling these reservations. How do you see the company evolving as that happens?
Jack Morrison (32:59):
Really trying to stay laser focused on just building and scaling M.52. I think many startups, especially hardware startups, start to get a little bit of a success from their first product and then their eyes get really big and they start to overreach. I want to make sure that we've got M.52 out there in mass and our customers know how to operate, we know how to operate it before we start letting our eyes go astray.
(33:27):
But from there, there's lots of different opportunities both on the hardware and the software side to help landscapers do more from a smaller mower, maybe a larger mower, and then all sorts of other equipment where the pattern of operation looks very similar to mowing, but helps landscapers get more work done from aeration to leaf removal, cedar sprayers, all sorts of other tasks done in landscaping.
Cody Simms (33:53):
Would you say your true north is electrification, your true north is autonomy and robotics? I mean, how do you prioritize that growth vector of the business in that regard?
Jack Morrison (34:04):
Our true north is helping people take better care of the outdoors. That's maybe ambiguous, but I think that requires both electrification and autonomy and web solutions that help these businesses to think more clearly and plan better so that they can do more work and be more efficient in how they take care of these outdoor spaces. I think like we were talking about with the business model side of things, the electrification, the autonomy, they really go hand in hand.
(34:35):
It'd be really hard to do the autonomy without the electrification and vice versa. Building the hardware, the software, the cloud software, the operations, the manufacturing all simultaneously means we've got a lot of problems to solve and really interesting challenges at Scythe. But I think it puts us on a path to being successful because we have all of this knowledge under one roof and because all of it feeds back into the core business.
Cody Simms (35:03):
Where do you need help today? You've raised a successful Series B. I presume you have roles you need to fill. You're looking for customer adoption and more orders. For anyone listening, regardless of what aspect they're listening from, where would you like people to help out?
Jack Morrison (35:19):
We've got a bunch of roles open on our website today. We're hiring across engineering, manufacturing, customer operations. We'd love to meet folks who are interested in the climate fight and see something that might be a fit for them or great folks who don't see a fit. We've got to catch all role about people who love robots on our hiring page that we'd love people to apply to. We've got landscaping contractors out there or folks who have family or know contractors.
(35:45):
We'd love to meet them. We're always looking to add more great folks who are interested in transitioning their businesses to the next generation of outdoor power equipment. And then just to other folks on their own climate journeys. I am a member of MCJ and love meeting other founders in the space, other folks working to build great businesses and transition us away from fossil fuels.
Cody Simms (36:11):
I love it. Jack reached out to me a few weeks ago and said, "Hey, who are the other climate founders that you know in Boulder because I want to help continue to build community and boulder around climate tech?" Anyone local who's listening, definitely reach out to Jack. It's great to see more of a community continuing to form. Boulder obviously already has a fantastic community of folks working on climate solutions. Jack, what else should I have asked?
Jack Morrison (36:33):
This was great. I think you covered all the pieces.
Cody Simms (36:37):
Fantastic. Well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for going after a solution that, again, may be non-obvious, but as soon as everyone listens to this, you're going to start noticing it's going to become more and more obvious, I think, as it has to me. Again, it's just a reminder that when it comes to electrifying everything, sure, EVs are amazing, heat pumps are amazing, but there are lots of other technologies in our daily lives that are going to be undergoing transformation over the next five, 10 years. With what you're building at Scythe, you're tackling the big one. Thank you, Jack.
Jack Morrison (37:10):
Thanks for having me on, Cody, and thanks for running this podcast. It's great. Anybody out there, seasoned local landscapers, some gas mowers, tell them all about Scythe Robotics and how they can do more with the crew they've already got and get rid of all of their polluting equipment.
Cody Simms (37:25):
All right. Thanks, Jack.
Jack Morrison (37:26):
Thanks, Cody.
Jason Jacobs (37:28):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey Podcast.
Cody Simms (37:32):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about power and collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (37:40):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know via Twitter at @mcjpod.
Yin Lu (37:51):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ Venture Funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Cody Simms (38:01):
Thanks and see you next episode.
