Jack Morrison and Davis Foster, the co-founders of Scythe Robotics, have launched a new venture: Agency Tool Co. The startup aims to provide fast, reliable infrastructure for robotics developers, starting with a product called ATC Deploy that tackles the messy problem of over-the-air (OTA) software updates.
Morrison and Foster left Scythe about a year ago. Since then, they've been consulting with robotics companies and observing the landscape. "I wanted to see what's out there and get my hands dirty building again," Morrison told The Robot Report. What they found was a pattern: many companies were wrestling with the same operational challenges that Scythe had faced during its eight-year journey.
"It's all the same problems," Morrison said. "We worked with a handful of companies, in mostly technical areas, some in leadership coaching, and saw everybody struggling with exactly the same challenges that we had struggled with at Scythe."
The robotics industry has matured significantly in recent years. The AI boom brought a wave of new companies and funding, while established players are now ready to scale. This creates a ripe environment for infrastructure tools like ATC Deploy, according to Morrison.
"Today, we hear a lot in robotics about this kind of zeitgeist around deploying robots and getting robots in the field," he said. "You need to learn from robots in the field, but ultimately, you can't do that if you're bottlenecked on how you put the software out there."
OTA updates remain a stubborn hurdle for the robotics industry. While consumers take for granted that their phones and laptops update seamlessly, robots present a different challenge. Morrison noted that many outside the industry assume the problem is solved. "Installing software is something that everyone does. People do that 10 times a week. You put a new app on your iPhone. You download something on Windows, or you update Chrome," he said. "But when it comes to robots, there really isn't a tool that's made to make it easy."
From his Scythe days, Morrison knows firsthand how fragile the process can be. "Today, you've got to manage a whole host of scripts to copy the software onto the machine to change which version is running, to manage restarting the software when you do ship a new version, to validate that it didn't get corrupted when it was transferring, and that's just with one robot sitting in front of you," he said. "You scale that out to tens, hundreds, or thousands of machines, and it becomes a problem."
ATC Deploy is designed to work with whatever deployment strategy or application architecture customers already use. It supports their own operating system images, Docker OCI images, and any file or directory tree. The system pushes updates to robots wherever they are, even in challenging environments like underwater or remote locations with flaky connections.
For founders and operators building commercial robots, Agency Tool Co.'s focus on OTA infrastructure signals a maturing ecosystem. As fleets grow, the ability to reliably update software without manual intervention becomes a competitive advantage. The startup's value proposition is clear: let the experts handle the plumbing so robotics teams can focus on the robot's core functionality.
Morrison and Foster are betting that the industry is ready to pay for specialized tools rather than cobbling together scripts. If they're right, Agency Tool Co. could become a critical piece of the robotics stack, much like AWS did for web infrastructure.
Source: The Robot Report.