Tesla’s Autonomy Day in April 2019 gave supporters of the company a look into Elon Musk’s vision of a fully-autonomous future. While the event featured the company’s strategies for the future as it prepares to “free investors from the tyranny of having to drive their own cars,” the $100 billion agriculture sector is also looking into sustainable, self-driving technologies that would revolutionize the industry.
Santa Monica, California-based lawn and landscaping startup Graze is developing a solar-powered, fully-autonomous lawn mower that requires no human interaction. The battery-operated, fully-autonomous mower is being developed by Graze CEO John Vay who has an extensive background in landscaping, and CTO Roman Flores whose past employers include NASA and the Caltech Curiosity Mars Rover Team. The two minds are developing the product in an attempt to revolutionize commercial agriculture as we know it.
The need for this solution is evidenced by conditional LOIs placed by two of the nation’s top landscaping companies, LandCare and Mainscape, worth an expected value of $36 million. In a time when the shrinking U.S. labor force is burdening the landscaping industry, the Graze self-driving electric mower gives commercial landscaping companies the ability to maintain more job sites without the need to hire more workers. Its 53-inch cutting deck is nearly six times the size of any other robotic mower and its fully-autonomous operation allows for no embedded ground wires or beacons to do its job properly.
The Graze mower also gives a level of safety and security that other mowers simply cannot provide. The mower’s ability to detect static and moving objects will keep children and animals safe.
Perhaps the most critical point of the Graze self-driving mower is the positive environmental impact the landscaping machine will have. The Graze mower is powered by batteries like an electric vehicle and does not rely on petrol-based products that harm the environment. Just one gas mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollution as 40 internal combustion cars. 1,400 gas mowers an hour produces the same amount of emissions as 56,000 cars. Thus, replacing the fleet of Graze’s first two customers, Landcare and Mainscape, would be the equivalent of removing 42 million gas-powered cars a year, slowing the rate at which the Earth moves toward a climate crisis.
Graze has secured early investments for the development of its electric and autonomous mower and now opening up investment opportunities to the Tesla community and believers of a sustainable future.
Working with Teslarati, Graze is currently conducting an investment round and looking to secure $10 million in total investments. One can become a shareholder into a company that holds arguably the most exciting product that has hit the agriculture and landscaping market in recent memory with an investment based on a $5.80 share price.
Join the movement and invest in the Tesla of agriculture.