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Naware founder Mark Boysen first tried killing weeds with drones and a 200-watt laser. <\/p>\n
He\u2019d been noodling on ideas for a startup with some friends, and thinking about how his family in North Dakota had lost three members to cancer, something they suspected may be related to chemicals in the groundwater. Finding a chemical-free way to kill weeds seemed like a solid option.<\/p>\n
But the laser was a dead end. There\u2019s too much risk of starting a fire, he told TechCrunch in an interview. After a lot of trial-and-error prototyping with ideas like cryogenics. The solution he settled on \u2014 which he showed off <\/a>earlier this year at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025<\/a> \u2014 is steam.<\/p>\n Boysen\u2019s company has developed a system that uses computer vision to spot weeds in lawns and fields and golf courses, and kill them with nothing but vaporized water. It can be attached to mowers, or tractors, or even ATVs. At the moment, Naware is flexible, and Boysen is visibly eager for his idea to spread fast \u2014 much like the weeds he\u2019s trying to kill.<\/p>\n In a world of agentic AI and billion-dollar software companies, Naware stands out as a classic garage startup story. Boysen said his team first tested the use of steam by ordering a \u201crinky dink\u201d garment steamer off of Amazon. After that, they ordered seven more. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not real industrial,\u201d Boysen said he quickly realized. \u201cAnd so there\u2019s a lot of research helping to develop that, to get to the point of: \u2018how do we make this effective and make it repeatable so it can scale?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Developing the steamer tech was one challenge, but the bigger one may have been identifying the weeds, Boysen said. It\u2019s well-established that artificial intelligence software can be trained to accurately recognize objects or patterns, but the \u201cgreen-on-green\u201d problem was tough, he said \u2014 especially because the software has to recognize the weeds in real-time while the rig is prowling over a lawn. (And yes, it\u2019s using Nvidia GPUs.) <\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> He thinks they\u2019ve gotten there, though. He said Naware is targeting companies that do lawn care for athletic fields and golf courses, and claims his company can save customers like that \u201canywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 on chemicals alone.\u201d<\/p>\n On top of that, he said customers will save money by not having to pay for people whose only job is to spray those chemicals. Naware has been doing paid pilots to test and dial in the product, but Boysen\u2019s pitch has already attracted prospective partners, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going after the strategic partnerships. We\u2019re in discussions with $5 billion companies that do equipment manufacturing that are interested in our product. And we\u2019re a couple conversations into that \u2014 I can\u2019t say their name, but you\u2019ll figure it out,\u201d he laughed.<\/p>\n Success, Boysen said, will take three things: those partnerships, securing patents, and funding. Boysen has been bootstrapping Naware for now, but said he\u2019ll open its first fundraising round in the coming months.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got to get a funding round that just crushes anybody else trying to think about it\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got to deliver the promise that I can kill weeds, and it\u2019s effective. And we\u2019ll make it work. I\u2019m not concerned about that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n