Davis Foster

Jack Morrison attended The George Washington UniversityGeorge Washington UniversityGeorge Washington University (officially The George Washington University) is a university in Washington, D.C., United States, whose forerunner was Columbian College.Open the full entry as a PhD student in computer science but left to co-found Replica Labs, of which Isaac Roberts was also a co-founder; Morrison served as Replica Labs’ chief technology officer until the company was acquired by Occipital in 2016, and then stayed on at Occipital as a computer vision engineer until he co-founded Scythe Robotics in April 2018.⁠[1]

Robotics 24/7 writes that Morrison met him when they both worked at Occipital, where Morrison saw first-hand the young man’s talent as an electrical engineer working with 3D perception technology. The abstract of the Pransky interview in Industrial Robot calls him “Occipital’s Davis Foster.” Billy Otteman, director of marketing at Scythe Robotics, also said in 2023 that he was one of the electrical engineers Morrison was working with at the time.⁠[2][1][3]

In 2018 he founded Scythe Robotics together with Jack Morrison and Isaac Roberts; the company is based in Boulder, ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry, and develops autonomous mowers for commercial landscaping. The abstract of the Pransky interview in Industrial Robot dates Morrison’s co-founding of Scythe Robotics to April 2018.⁠[4][2][5][1][6]

Accounts of how the company began differ. The NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry blog writes that Morrison and Roberts, the co-founders of Replica Labs, had grown restless after their 3D vision startup was acquired about two years earlier; in 2018 Morrison hit on the idea of autonomous mowers while mowing his own lawn, and the two then co-founded Scythe Robotics together with Davis Foster.⁠[5]

Morrison himself wrote in “Meet Scythe Robotics,” a company blog post of June 15, 2021, that he reached out to the two people with just the right skills: Davis Foster and Isaac Roberts. He wrote that Foster, then 21, was a “talented and scrappy” electrical engineer and his teammate at Occipital, and that Roberts, his former Replica cofounder, was a serial entrepreneur who had grown up around the landscaping industry; both were “skeptical but intrigued.” Morrison wrote that it was a giant market in which Roberts could build strong customer relationships and a highly nuanced technical problem that he and Foster could address with their hardware and software skills, and so they started Scythe to build an autonomous, commercial-grade mower.⁠[7]

In Billy Otteman’s account, Morrison, a computer vision engineer by trade, was mowing his property, a job he admittedly does not enjoy, when he had a light-bulb moment and thought robots could do it; he talked to Davis Foster, one of the electrical engineers he was working with at the time, and the two looped in Isaac Roberts (the COO at the time of the interview). Roberts has an entrepreneurial background and expertise in sales and grew up in the landscape industry building golf courses with his family business. Otteman said that the three founders all had history with each other and expertise in different arenas.⁠[3]

Robotics 24/7 writes that Morrison was already having conversations with Davis Foster about starting an automation company.⁠[2]

On July 10, 2019, the Thiel Foundation named the 22 members of the 2019 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, among them Davis Foster. The list gives his location as “Boston, MA/Boulder, CO,” his project as Scythe Robotics and his fields as robotics, hardware and autonomous vehicles, and describes Scythe Robotics as building industrial-scale, computer vision-driven autonomous lawn mowers for commercial landscaping.⁠[8]

On June 15, 2021, Scythe Robotics emerged from stealth and announced a $13.8 million Series A led by Inspired Capital, bringing its total funding to $18.6 million; existing investors True Ventures, Zigg Capital and Lemnos took part.⁠[4][9]

The company launched a commercial-grade, all-electric, fully autonomous mower with eight HDR cameras and other sensors that detect people, animals and obstacles and capture data on the property and the mower’s performance. It uses a Robotics as a Service (RaaS) model, billing customers by acres mowed, targets the $105 billion commercial landscaping industry, and was expanding operations in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and Colorado.⁠[4]

Built In writes that the company then had 27 employees and expected to reach 35 by the end of the year, with the goal of mass production by the end of 2022 and about 200 machines in operation by then.⁠[9]

In a company blog post published the same day, Morrison wrote that the company had spent three years building in stealth and was headquartered just outside Boulder, Colorado, with offices in Austin, Texas and Vero Beach, Florida.⁠[7]

Robotics 24/7 wrote in June 2022 that the three made up the leadership team of Scythe Robotics, with Morrison as CEO, Davis Foster as hardware lead and Roberts as chief operating officer.⁠[2]

The company’s autonomous mower, the M.52, is all-electric, weighs 1,110 lb, has a top speed of 10 mph, and has a 52-inch tri-blade rear-discharge deck, 20x12 tires and flat-free casters; its technology includes 3D mapping, onboard semantic segmentation, onboard visual SLAM, terrain-aware motion planning, eight HDR cameras and various sensors.⁠[2]

The mower is not sold as a standalone product; the target customers are large commercial landscape contractors with annual revenue from $1 million to hundreds of millions of dollars. The mower was tested in Colorado, Texas and Florida, and more than 5,000 had been reserved. Morrison said at the time that the company had started delivering on those reservations, had delivered M.52s to Clean Scapes in Austin, Texas, and was working on getting machines to its other early reservation partners that year; he said it would deploy primarily in Texas and Florida in 2022 and 2023 and, beyond 2023, start looking more broadly across the country and rolling out in new regions.⁠[2]

On January 24, 2023, Scythe Robotics announced a $42 million Series B led by Energy Impact Partners, with new investors including ArcTern Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Amazon’s Alexa FundAlexa FundThe Alexa Fund is a corporate investment fund Amazon set up in June 2015 with up to $100 million for developers, hardware makers and startups working on voice technology. Amazon added another $100 million in 2017, and the fund later expanded into artificial intelligence, hardware and entertainment.Open the full entry. Built In Colorado gives the company’s total funding as $60.6 million, TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry as more than $60 million and Robotics 24/7 as about $60 million.⁠[10][6][11]

The round was partly to fund the delivery of the 7,500 existing customer reservations (BizWest writes “more than 7,500 reservations”), and BizWest calls the company’s debut mower the Scythe M.52x. TechCrunch writes that the company began delivering M.52 mowers to customers in Texas in late 2022 and was starting deliveries in Florida; it had just over 50 employees and planned to hire dozens more over the next 12 months across engineering disciplines and to more than double its manufacturing and customer teams.⁠[10][12][11]

Built In Colorado writes that Scythe Robotics is based in Boulder County with headquarters in Longmont, had a headcount of 50 and planned to hire dozens of people in Colorado and Austin, with many roles based at the Longmont headquarters and some remote or hybrid; it calls him “Hardware Lead Davis Foster.”⁠[6]

On May 30, 2025, Jack Morrison announced on the Scythe Robotics blog that after seven years leading the company he had decided to transition leadership; Chief Operating Officer Brian Merkel would step in as interim CEO, effective immediately. Morrison wrote that he would continue to support the team however he could while exploring new opportunities.⁠[13]

On March 11, 2026, Scythe Robotics announced that it had been acquired by Autonomous Solutions, Inc. (ASI) of UtahUtahUtah is a U.S. state bordered by Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Colorado to the east, Arizona to the south and Nevada to the west, with its capital at Salt Lake City. It was admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896, as the 45th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 3,271,616 residents.Open the full entry, which the announcement calls “the worldwide leader of industrial vehicle automation.” The announcement says that Scythe and its team will continue to operate as an equipment brand within ASI Landscaping, that Scythe’s leadership will take roles within ASI to support technology integration, and that ASI will keep Scythe’s Longmont office.⁠[14][15]

The next day, Morrison and Foster, signing as co-founders of Scythe Robotics, published a joint post on the company blog, “Then, Now, and Next: Our Chapters at Scythe.” It says that eight years earlier they had set out to build a new breed of outdoor equipment bringing technology and nature closer together, that together they had built and fielded eight generations of autonomous mowers, cutting billions of square feet of grass the previous year with zero emissions, and that Scythe and the M.52 would become part of the ASI Landscaping Division, where M.52 development would continue.⁠[15]

Billy Otteman, director of marketing at Scythe Robotics, said in October 2023 that he is “kind of a hardware guru” and an all-around hardware expert in terms of the production and design of the electrical system, the motors and all of these components.⁠[3]

The Justia Patents inventor page lists, under the name Davis Thorp Foster, the U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry patents in which he is named: seven granted utility patents, three design patents and ten published patent applications. Six of the utility patents and all three design patents are assigned to Scythe Robotics, Inc.; the listed co-inventors include John Gordon Morrison, Isaac Heath Roberts and Robert Johnstone McCutcheon, IV, among others.⁠[16]

Among the utility patents assigned to Scythe Robotics: US 11553644 (filed July 8, 2020, granted January 17, 2023) detects suboptimal mowing caused by vegetation build-up or changes in orientation from blade speed, torque and current data, and remedies it or alerts the user; US 11765992 (filed July 8, 2020, granted September 26, 2023) and its continuation US 12382862 (filed August 9, 2023, granted August 12, 2025) detect a difference in orientation between the mower and the surface and raise the deck, idle the blades or adjust blade speed accordingly; US 11856883 (filed October 11, 2021, granted January 2, 2024) fuses radar and other sensors to build two- or three-dimensional vegetative health maps estimating moisture, soil density, light and surface temperature; US 12022769 (filed June 8, 2021, granted July 2, 2024) is an autonomous lawn mower whose sensor-carrying podium has an upper portion that can be calibrated separately before it is attached; and US 12365366 (filed June 14, 2021, granted July 22, 2025) is a manual mower control interface with a handle and a lever whose opposing tabs take input from the user’s fingers. The three design patents are D965030 (filed December 4, 2020, granted September 27, 2022), D985624 (filed August 31, 2022, granted May 9, 2023) and D1084046 (filed April 6, 2023, granted July 15, 2025).⁠[16]

The page also lists US 11770516 (filed December 29, 2021, granted September 26, 2023), assigned to XRPro, LLC, which describes a three-dimensional sensing apparatus for depth capture made up of two cameras, an optical filter and a projector subassembly with a laser diode; the listed co-inventors are Jeffrey Roger Powers, Vikas Muppidi Reddy, Paul Jakob Schroeder, Christopher Caleb Slaughter, Roger Wayne Landowski and Evan Haley Fletcher.⁠[16]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]