Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are highlighting nine startups from nine categories across the innovation space. We chose these firms based on their ability to fundamentally change the game in their respective fields, grow quickly and durably and develop useful products to solve compelling problems. Here's the honoree in the agriculture category.
Labor shortages and high fuel costs are wreaking havoc in the agriculture industry. Monarch Tractor may have the solution.
The Livermore-based company aims to revolutionize the farming industry with its driver-optional, fully electric tractor currently being tested at Napa vineyards. While the final product has not yet officially launched, the company is garnering a tremendous amount of hype around its potential to drastically upgrade the industry’s core piece of machinery and make farming more efficient and environmentally friendly.
Monarch expects to begin shipping out a small batch of tractors in the fourth quarter this year. It signed a deal last month with Foxconn to produce vehicles at a larger scale at a Ohio facility, with the first expected to roll out early next year.
“The most important vehicle on the planet is the tractor,” said Monarch CEO and co-founder, Praveen Penmetsa. “Without it, we would have never gotten the food production increases that would have allowed us to feed the world’s growing population.”
Penmetsa founded the company in 2017 by teaming up with Mark Schwager, who was previously the head of the Tesla Gigafactory; Zachary Omohundro, an electric vehicles and robotics professional who previously worked with Penmetsa; and Carlo Mondavi, a member of Mondavi Napa winemaking family with agricultural expertise.
His previous company, Motivo, worked on a broad array of robotics and automated vehicles across sectors, but also some projects in ag-tech that led to his pivot to Monarch.
“We were making everything from electric skateboards to electric aircrafts, but we moved into ag-tech when I was approached by a number of local farmers who asked if we could help build a robot for us to help with weeding, planting, etc.”
He eventually decided it would be more efficient to combine all the various ag-tech projects into one product, the tractor, and created a new company to do so.
“The tractor is involved in 80-plus percent of the operation, so if you want to change our food ecosystem looks from a sustainability standpoint, or from a food traceability standpoint, or from a chemical dependence standpoint, it’s the ideal device to transform,” he said.
Besides electrification and automation, Monarch adds smart sensors and other devices to allow farmers to gather data on their crops, while allowing other companies to build software and hardware to build on top of its vehicle, essentially turning the tractor into a tech platform.
The tractor has a battery that lasts 10 hours, which can be swapped out for longer jobs. The battery also can act as a generator for other appliances when the tractor is in the field. Monarch tractors will cost $58,000 at launch, compared to $30,000-$50,000 for a diesel tractor around the same size.
Penmetsa says the company has already over $5 million in revenue, despite not yet shipping out the tractor, partly due to a licensing deal with CNH Industrial to use Monarch’s electrification technology in its own line of tractors.
However, the real test of Monarch’s viability will be over the next year as its tractors are shipped to farms in California, Oregon and Washington, then later nationwide.
Since April last year, Monarch has been testing its tractors at the Wente Vineyard in Livermore and has since shipped its tractors to other vineyards in Napa, such as the Beckstoffer Vineyard. Penmetsa said he has all the major vineyards in California signed on to purchase tractors.
“Vineyards produce high value crops, which means they’re willing to try out new technologies,” he said. “They have the cash flow to invest into new tech, so a lot of the automation technologies that you see in other fruits and vegetables have sometimes originated in the vineyard space and then transitioned to other crops.”
Monarch Tractor
- Location: Livermore
- Industry: Agriculture
- Founders: Praveen Penmetsa, Mark Schwager, Zachary Omohundro, Carlo Mondavi
- Founded: 2017
- Funding: $81M
- Major investors: CNH Industrial, VST Tillers Tractors, At One Ventures
- Why they were chosen: The company’s core product could fundamentally change the farming industry by making it more energy, cost and labor efficient.
