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Electrical Sheep Robotics, an out of doors upkeep firm, has acquired two extra landscaping companies. Westar Landscaping and Caliscapes are the most recent 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 amass conventional landscaping firms 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 progress; buying Westar and Caliscapes builds on our profitable enterprise mannequin of injecting superior AI and robotics into conventional landscaping firms 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 completely scalable and sustainable enterprise that is known as a first within the out of doors providers 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 enhancing their margins by augmenting staff with automation is radically progressive, 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 unit to coach AI brokers for sustainable out of doors work. I’m excited to help their mission.”
The corporate considers a couple of elements when it’s selecting landscaping firms to amass. The primary is that it’s on the lookout for a various set of knowledge, which may embody 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 firms to amass.
“Our intent is to roll this as much as a whole lot of thousands and 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 following shift in robotics should occur with this progressive automation and reinforcement studying performed as much as that scale,” Murty advised 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 embody something from mowing and sweeping to information work like stock administration, buyer success, and advertising.
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 educated on.
Whereas the corporate’s acquisition mannequin does assist it to keep up profitability, it additionally performs an vital function in constructing its full-stack information channel. Murty mentioned that acquisitions are a great way for the corporate to amass essential information it may possibly use to construct its AI fashions. Electrical Sheep’s aim is to construct a foundational mannequin much like massive language fashions like ChatGPT, however for the bodily world as an alternative of for language.
“Immediately, 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 area effortlessly, you don’t have to coach a cat to go round your own home and do X, Y, Z. In the identical manner, I feel the mannequin that we’re constructing at its core is basically semantically conscious of its environment.”