Scythe Robotics is the winner of the 2022 Colorado Inno Award in the manufacturing category.
Scythe Robotics hit a turning point this year: After years of developing and taking reservations for its autonomous lawnmower, the company began sending them to customers. Over the next year, Scythe plans to ready its manufacturing process for mass production in 2024.
Location: Longmont
Top Exec: Jack Morrison, CEO
What inspired your business? With a career in computer vision and robotics, Scythe co-founder Jack Morrison was always brainstorming new ways to put these cutting-edge technologies to use. The idea for the business struck him in 2018 while mowing the lawn, a task he doesn’t particularly enjoy and is admittedly not very good at. He realized the state-of-the-art technology he’d been developing for years could be meaningfully leveraged in mowing.
What was Scythe’s biggest accomplishment of the year? In October 2021, Scythe launched the reservations list for M.52 – the company’s all-electric, fully autonomous commercial mower. By the summer of 2022, we exceeded 7,000 reservations. This includes some of the largest and fastest-growing businesses in the industry, such as Yellowstone Landscape, Clean Scapes, and Impact Landscaping & Irrigation. After years of Scythe’s field teams mowing with M.52 for contractors in Colorado, Texas and Florida, we began fully integrating the units into customer operations this summer, rolling out M.52 and beginning to fulfill the first orders on our massive reservations list.
What about your biggest challenge? The immense difficulty of developing this type of technology presents significant obstacles every day. “Robots are hard” is a phrase you’ll hear repeated often around the office and in the field as the team rides the relentless roller coaster of fast-paced product development.
Have there been any drawbacks to being based in Colorado? One obvious drawback for a Colorado-based mower manufacturer is the lack of year-round mowing. While the team is made of avid skiers and snowboarders who love to shred, winter can slow product development and deployment. To keep pace, we established outposts in Vero Beach, Florida, and Austin, Texas. These field operations, located in some of the largest and most active landscaping markets in the country, have allowed us to build an even more robust product while also expanding our customer base beyond our hometown.
What are your goals for the next year? Ramping production of M.52 is Scythe’s primary focus for the next year. We plan to build and deploy dozens of pre-production units by this time in 2023, further refining the product and optimizing the onboarding process before scaling to mass production in 2024.
If you had to choose a mascot for your company, what would it be? The buffalo would make a great mascot for Scythe. Big and powerful like M.52, these creatures roam the unstructured outdoor spaces of Colorado on their own, eating loads of grass and positively contributing to the local environment.
Colorado Inno Awards manufacturing finalists:
- Boom Supersonic
- Maybell Quantum Industries
