theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Physical AI & Robotics Leaders | Jack Morrison, Scythe Robotics

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Jack Morrison

Co-Founder & CEO

Scythe Robotics

play_circle_outline CEO of Scythe Robotics discussing autonomous commercial lawnmower technology and business model

play_circle_outline Product details: Scythe M.52 autonomous electric lawnmower with advanced sensors

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Jack Morrison, Scythe Robotics

Jack Morrison

Co-Founder & CEO Scythe Robotics

In this compelling video, Jack Morrison of Scythe Robotics joins theCUBE's John Furrier during the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Wired Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Media Week. The discussion takes place amidst the bustling environment of the NYSE, focusing on Scythe Robotics' innovative solutions within the broader context of Citi Robotics Week.

Morrison shares insights into the world of autonomous machines, emphasizing the adoption and impact of robotic solutions in landscaping. The video explores how theCUBE Research and video hosts, inclu... Read more

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What is the origin story of Scythe Robotics and what is their mission? add

How is the product M. 52 described and what features does it have? add

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Jack Morrison, Scythe Robotics

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>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at our NYSE CUBE Studios in New York City on the show floor of the stock exchange. All the actions happening here in the East Coast is our access point. Of course, we've got Silicon Valley and Palo Alto connecting tech and Wall Street together. Jack Morrison, CEO of Scythe Robotics is here, part of the Citi Robotics Week we're doing with AI leaders. Jack, welcome to theCUBE. Did I get that right?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah. - Robotics. Okay, good.

>> Thanks. - So Citi's doing a big event, obviously thanks

>> for coming by, dropping down.

Jack Morrison

>> Trades starting to kick off. A lot of options, volatility going on in this market this week. So Citi, obviously big bank doing all kinds of deals, seeing that you've got investors, you've got industry cohorts here, peers. What's going on in robotics right now? I know I want get into your solution, but Citi's got this big program. What's going on in the program up there?

Jack Morrison

>> I mean, there's a lot happening in robotics nowadays. All the humanoids, I think folks see a lot about in the news, raise a lot of funding rounds. And then, robots like what we build at Scythe that are more utilitarian and solving real problems for folks out in the world, from operations and maintenance like we do in landscaping, to construction. Lots of cool stuff happening.

>> So talk about your firm. How long has it been around? When's the origination story? What's going on?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, we started Scythe Robotics out in Longmont, Colorado about seven years ago. So we're based just outside Boulder, beautiful country out there. Mission is to help humanity take better care of all of our outdoor spaces. We want to bring zero emission autonomous machines to help the people who are doing the work and the businesses that care for our green space, to do it in a cleaner, more scalable way. So our product today is called Scythe M.52. It's an autonomous electric commercial lawnmower mower, think a lawn Roomba, but a thousand pounds, four and a half feet wide, 30 kilowatt battery-

>> So it's cutting a lot of grass.

>> Cutting a lot of grass. We can cut 15

Jack Morrison

>> to 20 acres in a single day on a single charge.

>> Wow. Got my attention on that one. I've seen little robots on golf courses, like cleaning up the driving range or whatever, but that's a pretty big device. It's an industrial piece. What's some of the tech involved and what's the efficiencies look like? I mean, how do you build this? Well, first take us through the product.

>> Sure, yeah. So M.

Jack Morrison

>> 52 is a lot more like a self-driving car, frankly than a Roomba. So it's got eight cameras, a stereo pair in each cardinal direction, so it can see in depth in 360 degrees. It's got GPS, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and it uses all of those sensors to navigate a large property, think a large office, campus, park, school yard, and to do all the mowing while the landscaping contractors who are out there get to go and do all of the rest of the work that it takes to make a space pretty.

>> Yeah, not all grass is like Manhattan where you've got the grid.

Jack Morrison

>> Not so much. - Yeah, I just love about Manhattan.

>> It's hard to get lost here, but I mean, I know the city, but take me through the landscape. I mean, obviously you mentioned the human is in the loop still, you still got a crew, so it's not trivial to map out landscape. You've got obstructions, you've got some things going on.

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, we make it as easy as possible. So the way M. 52 gets deployed into a landscaping operation is today they've got crews of four to six guys who go out to a property. They take a handful of mowers, a bunch of hand tools. You can basically replace all of the larger mowers with M. 52 and then take one or two guys off that crew, and shift them to another job site-

>> So finishing work. - ...

>> so they can have more work done. Yeah, exactly.

Jack Morrison

>> All of the finishing, edging, trimming, leaf blowing, trash pickup. They, when they get to a new property, drive off the trailer, put the machine into the grass, trace out, the first time they show up, the boundary of a mobile area and then it records that geofence, remembers it. So it's super easy actually to get started, but they only have to do it the first time. After that, they just show up and hit go basically, and the machine takes off.

>> Yeah, I mean, most people think of like the big equipment

>> as like the big tractors you sit on. Everyone sees their friend on the big multi acre property with his John Deere or whatever equipment he has, but the size is similar. A thousand pounds, so it's big.

>> Yep. 52 inches wide.

Jack Morrison

>> So that's kind of the middle class of these commercial lawnmowers. They range from 48 to 72, like those zero turns. Ours is a stand-on platform, so you can actually drive it manually. You can mow any of the complicated areas yourself and let the autonomy handle all the wide open space that takes a long time.

>> And it's easy to take mobile, trailer, no problem.

>> Yep, just like any other mower.

Jack Morrison

>> Looks like any other mower. If you didn't know it was autonomous, you could hop on and just start mowing with a few clicks, basically.

>> All right, so how's it going here at the

>> investor conference? How's the financing? Give us a little stats on business model, where you guys are at, funding.

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, so we've raised through a series B that was led by Energy Impact Partners a couple of years ago here in New York. Great partners to have, we are deploying machines now in about 15 states across the country. We actually don't sell the machines outright, we lease them to landscaping contractors. So we do a fixed monthly lease that includes some amount of autonomous mowing acreage. That way our incentives are aligned with our customers. We want them to get as much mowing done, they want to get as much labor leverage as possible. So it kind of works out all around.

>> What about the business model around residential versus business, government? Is it mostly business and government, municipal kind of things?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, today about 95% of our work is commercial contractors. So they're privately held businesses who do between a million and 800 million in annual gross revenues. We've got a handful of municipalities that we work with who are great partners, but a little slower on the uptake. Residential is the long tail, right? There's thousands and thousands of residential contractors out there. We'll build a smaller mower for them eventually, but we wanted to start with the larger businesses who care for the large spaces.

>> Okay. So I moved to California, so I don't have this problem anymore. But back east, people do have good, and certainly Colorado where you live, there's a lot of landscape there. How much is the device? Let's just say I wanted to buy one from my house, I had a couple of acres and I've got a green big lawn. What would it cost?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, so we won't sell it. The thing about selling a robot is you really, you need to drive that price into the ground basically, and that makes it hard to do really advanced autonomy, right? Roombas are the cheapest, vacuums are the cheapest robots you can buy and most people still think-

>> Still think they're too expensive. - ...

Jack Morrison

>> they're too expensive. Right, they're always-

>> Too expensive for the average person.

Jack Morrison

>> Yes. Yep. Only they're B2B.

>> So we sell, well, we lease them to contractors today and it's cheaper than a human.

>> So your go-to-market is

>> through channels, from the contractors?

>> Through the contractors. We go direct with them.

Jack Morrison

>> We work with our contractor partners to deploy the machines. They use them on dozens of properties any given week, charge them at their depots.

>> So the unit economics work for them,

>> but not for the individual.

Jack Morrison

>> Right. - It's not in your best-

Jack Morrison

>> Because they're getting dozens of hours of mowing

>> And you're a young company, so it's not like you need

>> to sell to individuals.

Jack Morrison

>> Right. - No volume there.

Jack Morrison

>> We're not looking. There's actually 300,

>> 000 commercial mowers sold in the US every year. The mowers only last three years, and so they cycle out really, really quickly. And so, we're really targeting those 300,000 mowers.

>> I was going to ask the quality question failure.

>> So three years they cycle out. That must be a big part of the reliability, you said sustainability is a big message. Obviously you've got that. Quality-wise, what's the alternative? Can you compare and contrast that?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, so most of these mowers last somewhere two to four years. One of the largest landscapers out there I know cycles all of their mowers out every two years, because the maintenance costs go through the roof. So we've designed M.52 to last five to eight years out in the field, last much longer, because we don't sell them. We don't profit when they break, we profit when they mow. And so, we invested really heavily in making sure it was a very reliable machine.

>> How's business going? - It's good. Yeah, 15 states.

Jack Morrison

>> We just signed our 15th state on last week. We got about a hundred contractors using M.52 nowadays. Very exciting stuff. We're ramping up to hundreds of machines out in the field this year and we want to take it to thousands and beyond.

>> How about the tech? You mentioned it's like a

>> Tesla, talk about some of the things. Computer vision. There's an AI angle in here, computer vision, processors, let's get into the hood, so to speak.

>> Yeah. All kind of Edge AI.

Jack Morrison

>> So we've got the eight high dynamic range cameras on the machine. It's doing semantic segmentation, so understanding what's a tree, what's a person, doing depth perception directly from those cameras. There's no LiDAR, no radar, we use the cameras really well. And doing a whole bunch of really cool stuff on the device to understand where it's safe to mow, where it shouldn't mow, what's a tree versus a person. So we stop when a person or a dog comes nearby, but we'll just drive right around a tree, so that the operators can get the most amount of work done.

>> And we're not going to obstruct. A big log is in the

>> middle of the grass-

Jack Morrison

>> It'll just drive around it.

>> So it'll see it. - Yep.

>> Do you guys use synthetic data on training to know

Jack Morrison

>> where the tree is, or are you guys just...

Jack Morrison

>> We've collected a couple of hundred thousand labeled images at this point of all of the areas that we operate in. We've been deploying machines now for six years. We have the largest collection.

>> So you have your own data set?

Jack Morrison

>> We do, yep. And growing.

>> We've been collecting and labeling data, because that's really our advantage is understanding these worlds, the world off-road, where all the people operate and how things work out there.

>> You know, it's interesting. When you see changes like AI and robotics happening, a couple of things come back in the industry. And I think what's different now is that things change with AI and data, because you have an ecosystem with open source. The old classic business school, conventional wisdom is first mover advantage. But that sometimes gets into like, okay, what's your mode? What's your sustainable competitive advantage? You what's happening in AI is first mover advantage is a durable move, because the data angle, I was just talking to another company in therapeutics, their device has hardware-software integration, so they can bring in synthesis from other people to inject in. That would have been another product. And so, AI brings this, like you have the space and the modeling space, literally the space to model. But if you get the data, say the raw data, not synthetic data, real tree data, like you know what a tree is.

>> We know what trees look like in Colorado versus Ohio

Jack Morrison

>> versus Florida, and they're different. And you got to understand that-

>> You know what a garden bed looks like, you know what

>> edging looks like, you know landscape contour. I'm sure people could find that, but once you get critical mass of the data, do you guys see it the same way? Is it a tipping point of data?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I see it as a flywheel that we get going. As we put more robots on more properties, we get more training data that helps us make better autonomy, a better hardware product, and ultimately that helps our customers to grow their business. And that's really the flywheel, is we help them to grow by having better autonomy. That means they grow, they buy more robots and that feeds all back into itself.

>> Yeah, I mean, I just love the idea there. So take me through the examples of some stories. Stories drive movements. This is kind of a movement, you're in a cool area. One, it's fun. I love autonomous anything, especially machinery. What are some stories, share some stories of a customer situation or something that you've been involved in that was either weird, fun, successful, to give people a snapshot of kind of some of the things you're doing.

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, I mean one of the really exciting things about deploying machines to these real businesses across the country is helping them to scale up and to grow. And we've had customers, they're able to bid their jobs at like 10% lower cost than they would without M. 52, which in a business that only has about 8% operating margins to start with is a huge deal for them. So one of our private equity sponsored companies is doubling their use of robots year over year, looking to potentially double through this mowing season as they grow. And that's just really encouraging. They're acquiring businesses every few months and one of their core metrics is how quickly can we put robots into a new company that we acquired? I think that's going to be the world. We've heard a lot of talk about AI going into service businesses of all kinds. And disembodied AI, LLMs are very cool for any business to make use of, but physical AI and actually be able to automate the operations, the biggest cost center and the hardest part of these businesses, I think is just a huge opportunity. So it's encouraging to see some fast- growing business owners really lean into that.

>> So do you have one? - I bring a few home every weekend.

>> The benefit of being- - Exactly.

Jack Morrison

>> I live on 10 acres actually out in Colorado.

Jack Morrison

>> My wife's a horse trainer and so I get to bring a few home. I set three up at once and I can do all of the mowing in about an hour and a half.

>> The best lawn of anyone in the neighborhood,

>> because you can take care of it faster.

>> Exactly. - Most lawns go to hell in a hand basket,

>> because they don't mow it.

Jack Morrison

>> Exactly. And that's kind of my impetus

Jack Morrison

>> for starting Scythe back seven, eight years ago, was I didn't spend nearly enough time. I didn't get to mowing fast enough. My wife wasn't pleased by it and I thought there's got to be a better way than me going and sitting out on the tractor for hours at a time.

>> Yeah, big properties. That's kind of tedious. I got to ask you on the hardware side, is it durable in the sense of reliability? Do they have a swappable program? If I'm going to do a lot of jobs, my fear would be disruptions to operations.

>> Oh, absolutely. And that's a huge problem

Jack Morrison

>> for the gas mowers today. They break all the time. Belts, pulleys, hydraulic lines, fuel lines, they fall apart constantly. So one of the things is because it's an EV, it's got about a 10th of the moving parts of a normal gas. Same with gas cars versus EVs, way fewer moving parts means way less stuff to break. We've also reliability tested the hell out of the thing. So we've got a bump track in our office in Colorado. We've tested it to 5,000 hours of mowing use with no failures on it, but if the worst does happen and something breaks on it, because we're leasing the machines, we're really leasing the service of M. 52 and we will endeavor to swap that machine out as quickly as possible.

>> Does the customer have to carry two as a backup

>> or they usually go with one?

Jack Morrison

>> For folks who have multiple machines on site, we'll usually leave a spare robot there. They don't have to bring it with them on the trailer, because it almost never breaks, but if they've got five or 10 of them, we'll leave one at their depot-

>> Try back at the other one, get the backup

>> unit. - ...

Jack Morrison

>> sit in the corner. They don't pay for the backup, we swap it out and that way we can go and fix it when we're ready.

>> So basically try to make them as back on track if something happens.

>> Exactly. We only get paid if they're mowing,

Jack Morrison

>> and so that's everything about the company is set up to help landscapers get more out.

>> It's like cloud computing for mowing.

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, exactly. - Buy it with a drink. Buy it the slice.

>> It's usage-based pricing.

Jack Morrison

>> We want to be not only in our mission,

>> but in how we make money aligned with our customers.

>> It's good for the economy. I mean, good for the energy side of it. Moving parts, reliability, checks all the boxes. Talk about the go-to-market. What's some of the KPIs you guys track? Obviously the go-to-market's through the customers that have multiple jobs, you get paid by the mowing. More mowing, more money. Do you guys look at like a SaaS platform like, "Hey, another blade of grass growing?" I mean, I'm not, that's over-the-top.

>> Yep. Yeah, we track acres mowed,

Jack Morrison

>> autonomously acres mowed, manually. Looking at that ratio of how much our customers are mowing manually, because it's a great manual mower as well. That's the thing, it's not just a robot. It doesn't look like a Mars rover. You can actually hop on it and mow really quickly. But of course, we want folks to be using the autonomy more and more, because that's how they get leverage. Yeah.

>> And human creativity can work on the tasks that need their expertise, not the mundane, put the headphones on and walk on a straight line kind of thing.

>> Yep. The nice thing actually about M.

Jack Morrison

>> 52 is that it is so quiet, because it's electric. You can put AirPods in and mow listening to a podcast or music, whereas on a gas lawnmower you need full- on ear protection.

>> On the operator side, sounds like it's a dream scenario. What's been the feedback from some of the customers? How many customers do you have?

>> Yeah, we've got about 50 customers deployed out

Jack Morrison

>> in the field today. It's been very positive. They really like both how quiet it is, how reliable it is, our customer support. It's a brand new product and so sometimes they have to call in, and ask how to do something, and we've invested in building a great team who can support customers. And then, the autonomy is kind of magic to them. They see the thing, they hit go and walk away, and can come back and have it just be done, and have the grasp be shorter again.

>> How do you guys think about the connectivity from the device back to the branch through the cloud?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, so we've got dual LTE modems on the machine, so always has an uplink, multiple sims, so that-

>> Do you get ?

Jack Morrison

>> We get all the data. We try and not upload all that much.

>> A lot of it's really happening on the device, but we do record a lot of video. We get training data out of that. Any interventions that have to happen, where the machine gets confused and asks for help from our team on the remote side. We capture that imagery and upload it, so we can get that flywheel going.

>> Get that QA, get the product better.

Jack Morrison

>> Exactly. - Great stuff. Last minute.

>> Just put a plug in for what you're working on.

>> What's your focus right now? What are you optimizing for? Obviously more customers, expansion. What are some of your goals?

Jack Morrison

>> Yeah, we're scaling M.52 production, and so we're looking to get a few hundred machines out there. Anyone who's got a commercial landscaping contractor they work with who would like to electrify their operations, make it much quieter, we'd love to talk to them.

>> Cool. Well, thanks for coming

>> by theCUBE on the Citi event.

Jack Morrison

>> Awesome. Thanks for having me, John.

>> Appreciate it. Okay. I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE.

>> We're at the NYSE, the Citi Robotics Week coverage. Of course, the AI leaders here. Thanks for watching.