Editor's note: In our 2024 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders building groundbreaking products and companies in the Bay Area. Electric Sheep is one of 17 we profiled this year — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
Artificial intelligence will continue to power more and more real-world experiences, and in Electric Sheep’s vision of the future, AI is a practical, not apocalyptic, tool.
The San Francisco company is building a vertically integrated landscaping business that automates the traditionally manual process of mowing lawns.
Electric Sheep does this by developing its own robotic lawn mowers that are geofenced and programmed to recognize automatically different environments such as grass turf where they belong, and roads that should be avoided.
CEO Nag Murty and COO Jarrett Herold founded the company a few years ago after meeting through mutual friends. Murty brought his deep tech experience while Herold had a traditional landscaping background before pivoting to tech operations.
About Electric Sheep
- Founded: 2019
- Founders: CEO Nag Murty, Jarrett Herold
- Headquarters: San Francisco
- Employees: 50+
- Total funding: Over $25 million
- Major investors: Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, Kyber Knight, Grep
The goal isn’t to take human labor out of landscaping. Rather, Electric Sheep wants to give landscapers better tools, better pay and an overall better experience.
“We’re taking these guys who would have been stuck in a dead-end job pushing a lawnmower and now you’re giving them the ability to learn technology and oversee robots,” Murty said. “You are going to see robots end up elevating human potential and we want to do that for this industry.”
A single worker can manage six to eight of Electric Sheep's autonomous lawnmowers at a time, while working on other tasks nearby.
Automation and machine learning require large data sets, though, so the company started by collecting their own real-world data.
“We take what we learn in the field, and every single night our fleet of robots plugs in and uploads what it has learned and seen and what has confused it,” Herold said. "The rest of our team can run it through simulations.”
The company’s strategy also includes acquiring existing landscaping businesses, allowing it to enter local markets more quickly and get its automated services in front of customers.
“We’re looking at growing 10- to 20-fold over the course of the next one to two years, because we have a lot of companies willing to be acquired by us,” Murty said. “We’re in the process of finding the right capital providers who can fund this blitzkrieg acquisition road that we’re on.”
They currently offer landscaping services in Southern California and Tennessee.
Electric Sheep might only be a few years old, but Murty is already planning to take the company public one day.
“We want to hold into eternity and take it public,” Murty said, and continue to acquire small landscaping businesses and then “give them the latest tools, upskill their employees, help them reimagine what work could be like in landscaping, and grow the whole company. Just hold and grow. We don’t see ourselves selling these companies. We don’t see ourselves flipping to a larger private equity firm. We see ourselves basically growing much like how Berkshire Hathaway would ... or Amazon.”
