by Taylor Soper on October 21, 2024 at 4:30 am
He said his team lived and worked from trailers on farms months at a time.
“You can’t just design and test these machines from the comfort of your office. You have to be out there in the fields,” he said. “You’ve got to put in that time to really figure out what works and what doesn’t work.”
Mikesell said other agtech companies have received bad advice from their investors to use a “robots-as-a-service” model, in which they lease out equipment and generate cash via recurring revenue, similar to traditional software-as-a-service. That “just does not work in agtech,” he said.
“I think that’s where a lot of the problems come from, honestly — people trying to map old school business models onto AI robotics and realizing it doesn’t work until it’s too late,” Mikesell added.
Investors laud the leadership and vision of Mikesell, who also founded database startup Clustrix in 2006 (acquired by MariaDB) and was a manager at Seattle-based RealNetworks from 1998 to 2001. He earned a computer science degree from the University of Washington.
Erik Benson, managing director at Seattle-based Voyager Capital, called Mikesell a “once-in-a-generation talent who represents the good side of Tesla’s Elon Musk.”
Mikesell spends “hundreds of days a year in the field with farmers compared to his competitors who sit in their ivory towers in Silicon Valley not wanting to get their hands dirty,” Benson said via email.
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