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Electrical Sheep Robotics, an outside upkeep firm, has acquired two extra landscaping companies. Westar Landscaping and Caliscapes are the latest additions to Electrical Sheep’s landscaping portfolio.
With these new acquisitions, San Francisco-based Electrical Sheep Robotics has acquired 4 landscaping companies in current months. In October, it acquired Phenix Panorama and Full Landscaping. These acquisitions are a part of the corporate’s long-term technique to consolidate the landscaping trade. Electrical Sheep plans to accumulate conventional landscaping corporations and progressively rework their operations to incorporate its autonomous garden mowers and different robots.
Since implementing this mannequin, Electrical Sheep mentioned it has grown income eight occasions. And it doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime quickly. The corporate mentioned it has a rising pipeline of companies that would allow it to develop by 10 occasions in 2024.
“Electrical Sheep is at a crucial level in its development; buying Westar and Caliscapes builds on our profitable enterprise mannequin of injecting superior AI and robotics into conventional landscaping corporations and considerably rising their worth,” mentioned Nag Murty, CEO and co-founder of Electrical Sheep. “We’re bringing a brand new enterprise mannequin to an trade that’s ripe for innovation; by buying these companies first and incorporating this full information and AI deployment engine, we’re creating a totally scalable and sustainable enterprise that can be a first within the out of doors companies market.”
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Electrical Sheep Robotics constructed to scale
Electrical Sheep Robotics’ autonomous mower working alongside a landscaper. | Supply: Electrical Sheep Robotics
Electrical Sheep’s acquisition technique is a key side of its long-term marketing strategy. Buying already worthwhile companies, and sustaining that profitability as Electrical Sheep begins to introduce robotics to their operations, implies that the corporate might be worthwhile from day one.
“The ESR [Electric Sheep Robotics] enterprise mannequin of buying landscaping companies and bettering their margins by augmenting staff with automation is radically revolutionary, and a sustainable, quickly scalable solution to construct moonshot robotics,” mentioned Pieter Abbeel, professor in AI and Robotics at UC Berkeley, co-founder and chief scientist at Covariant, and long-time scientific advisor to Electrical Sheep. “As this mannequin scales, ESR is poised to construct an RL manufacturing facility to coach AI brokers for sustainable out of doors work. I’m excited to assist their mission.”
The corporate considers a couple of elements when it’s selecting landscaping corporations to accumulate. The primary is that it’s on the lookout for a various set of information, which might embrace a variety of workflows and websites. Jarrett Herold, Electrical Sheep’s co-founder and COO, additionally mentioned firm tradition is a big issue when selecting corporations to accumulate.Â
“Our intent is to roll this as much as tons of of hundreds of thousands, to virtually a billion {dollars}, in income and deploy on the scale of tens of hundreds of robots as a result of we imagine that the subsequent shift in robotics should occur with this progressive automation and reinforcement studying completed as much as that scale,” Murty instructed The Robotic Report in October.
Full stack strategy
Electrical Sheep makes use of machine studying fashions it designed to automate varied bodily duties. These duties can embrace something from mowing and sweeping to information work like stock administration, buyer success, and advertising and marketing.
The corporate’s robots discover, map, navigate, and manipulate the bodily world round them. They’re deployed in locations like HOAs, parks, college campuses, and extra. Electrical Sheep is growing a full stack information channel that its robots are frequently skilled on.
Whereas the corporate’s acquisition mannequin does assist it to take care of profitability, it additionally performs an essential position in constructing its full-stack information channel. Murty mentioned that acquisitions are a great way for the corporate to accumulate essential information it will possibly use to construct its AI fashions. Electrical Sheep’s aim is to construct a foundational mannequin just like giant language fashions like ChatGPT, however for the bodily world as a substitute of for language.
“In the present day, AI fashions actually perceive language, however they nonetheless haven’t any sense of bodily actuality,” Herold mentioned. “In case you take a cat, it navigates the bodily house effortlessly, you don’t have to coach a cat to go round your own home and do X, Y, Z. In the identical method, I believe the mannequin that we’re constructing at its core is basically semantically conscious of its environment.”
